by Otaro Maijo
But what about me?
Am I okay?
Not really.
But it could be worse. I managed to avoid a face shot, cum in my mouth, getting pregnant, and playing Caged Fury.
I’m okay.
I wouldn’t call it the best day of my life—in fact, it totally sucked. But I’ll live. I’ll move on.
I suppose I’m not the only stupid girl who ever slept with a guy she didn’t like. I bet there are more of them out there than I can imagine. And I bet a lot of them got cum on their faces or in their mouths, or even inside them and ended up in prison protecting their babies. Well, maybe not the Caged Fury part. But none of it matters anyway. What matters is that I got into a stupid mess, but it wasn’t the worst mess possible.
I’ll learn from my mistake, and I won’t ever sleep with somebody I don’t like ever again. Really. And I’ll find someone new to fall in love with. Someone different.
Who am I kidding? There won’t be anyone new, and I’ll be so lonely I’ll sleep with the first guy who comes along…only, this time I won’t. I really have learned my lesson…though lessons go only so far…Anyway, I just won’t do it again.
Aaaaaah!
“Yoji!”—I was talking out loud now—“I’d do it with you!” As the words bounced around the room, I sank down to my shoulders and buried my face in what was left of the foam. “I want you!” I blubbered, though this time the bubbles muffled the words.
I climbed out of the bath, put on a clean T-shirt and shorts, and wrapped my head in a towel. When I got back to my room, I pulled the Pulp Fiction DVD from the shelf and checked the scene where the poor black guy says he’s “pretty fucking far from okay.” It wasn’t LL Cool J. It was Ving Rhames. I should have known. I knew LL Cool J was a rapper. But wasn’t he in some movie too? Or was he? Was this another one of my mistakes? I suppose I’m not much good at telling one black person from another. But then, I can’t even tell the difference between boys I like and the ones I don’t. Pretty lame.
No, I’m not lame. I’m getting my act together this time. Really.
2
There was a kid in my sixth-grade homeroom named Takashi Nizaki. He was really smart and got good grades, but at times he could be a sadistic bully and a bit schizo. He would be friends with you one day only to cut you dead the next. He was smart and good at sports, and he could talk circles around everybody, but there was something a bit spooky about him. Still, he ruled the class. The only one who could stand up to him was Masaki Urayasu from the class next door, and when Urayasu was beating the crap out of Nizaki, it was Urayasu’s friend, Yoji Kaneda, who waded in to break it up.
Urayasu was really built, bulging pecs and all, and the punches he threw were on a whole different level from Nizaki’s. In fact, at the moment, he was pummeling Nizaki’s face—maybe because he could see how handsome it was—and each time he connected, Nizaki’s head spun around, his silky hair whipping back and forth in time with the impact. The fight had started in the hall after school. Just about everybody in our class had gathered around to watch, but nobody was trying to break it up. I guess some people might have been thinking that they should step in—that Nizaki was a bully but he’d never really hurt anybody—but when you looked around and saw that no one else was doing anything, it seemed easier to leave it alone—let Nizaki get a little of his own medicine. That’s what I thought anyway. His mistake here had been in picking his opponent—or rather in not picking him carefully enough. At any rate, by this point Urayasu had been beating on him for a minute straight, and Nizaki’s eye was all bloody, and I thought he might go blind if it went on like this. Then I realized Nizaki was crying—right in front of everybody. It was the first time I’d seen him cry, and I’m sure that was true for everyone else too. You could feel the shock—and maybe a little bit of excitement. There was this low whistling sound every time Nizaki breathed in through his nose, and then it got all sniffly—susususususu—like he was having a fit or something—right in time with his shoulders heaving. He’d sort of blow the air out—haaaaaa—and then suck it back in—susususususu. His stomach bucked, and you could tell he was having trouble breathing. To tell the truth, it was an awesome sight: here was a shithead bawling his eyes out. What kind of man was he? If he was going to get the crap beat out of him and cry like a baby, he should never have started this in the first place. Then I realized that Kan and Shima were standing right next to me, and I wondered whether they were feeling a little sympathy for Nizaki now that he was blubbering. But then I noticed they were yelling to Urayasu to keep going! I didn’t want to appear too out of it—so even though I’d been about to tell him to quit just a second before, I found myself suddenly hoping the jerk would get everything he had coming to him. I guess the real fun was thinking how hard it was going to be for him to show his face at school after this.
Urayasu went on thrashing Nizaki. Mercilessly. For whatever reason, he seemed to want to beat the last bit of shit out of him. The voices urging him on trailed off. It was getting a little scary. And Nizaki looked pretty awful—wonderfully so.
At this point a very ordinary-looking kid in a blue polo shirt—Yoji Kaneda— appeared on the scene. He wasn’t particularly tall or well built.
“Give it a rest, Ura,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s enough?”
“Not quite, Kane. I beat the shit out of this guy and he still doesn’t get it.”
“So why don’t you leave it at that—you beat the shit out of him and he doesn’t get it.”
“So I’ll keep on till he does get it,” Urayasu said.
“Nah, that doesn’t make much sense. Give it a rest.”
“I know it doesn’t make sense, but what the fuck!”
“Just back off a minute, how ’bout?” Urayasu had been straddling Nizaki, and as he climbed off, Kaneda patted him on the shoulder. “Pounding the crap out of a guy is hard work. Look at your hands—they’re all torn up.”
Urayasu glanced down at his raw, red knuckles.
“Shit! I fucked up my hands.”
“And they’ll know you were fighting if you go to the nurse’s office,” Kaneda added. “Just go wash up,” he said, sending Urayasu off in the direction of the boys’ room. When he was gone, Kaneda turned to Nizaki, who was still sobbing on the floor, and reached out his arm to help him up.
His long, slender, beautiful arm.
I can still remember exactly how it looked: the delicate joints at the elbow and wrist, the graceful taper so completely different from Urayasu’s beefy knob. As if something wonderful—an angel’s wing—had been called in to replace something awful—a pig’s foot maybe. That’s how it looked to me, anyway.
Cowering on the floor, Nizaki covered his face with his hands and kicked at the outstretched hand.
“Leave me alone!” he blubbered. “What do you think this is?”
To which the boy in the blue polo shirt replied quite simply: “It’s love.”
Yoji Kaneda was always game for anything, and he was always, always doing something stupid. He told me himself that he and a friend once pissed out the bus window on a field trip in elementary school (though he swore they didn’t hit anybody, not even any cars), and another time, on field day, he ran the hundred meters holding a badminton racquet, telling everybody he needed a handicap. He even ran a relay the same way. (He came in first in the hundred; in the relay, baton in one hand and racquet in the other, he managed to catch one runner on another team but then got the racquet caught between his legs and went sprawling.) And now, he’d said “It’s love,” and even though he added something stupid like “Love will save the world,” the word was still left hanging there. It was the first time I’d ever heard someone say the word so raw, just like that, and somehow it made me feel embarrassed. The first character of my name—the “ai” in Aiko—means “love.” But I’d hardly ever heard anyone use the word except in my name. And now I re
alized that nobody had been forcing me to stand there and watch Nizaki get the daylights beat out of him. It must have hurt, and it must have been a shock to be beat up in front of people like that. It would be for anybody. So it would have been natural enough, right at the start, to tell Urayasu to stop or do something to end it. You don’t stand around worrying that kids will think you have a crush on Nizaki; as soon as you realize it’s time to stop it, you speak right up and say something. My name may mean “love child,” but I seem to have a little deficit where the love’s concerned, and I sure as hell am never going to save any world. At least not like this.
All of sudden, I couldn’t stand being there anymore and walked away. Kan and Shima stayed behind—apparently they really were infatuated with Nizaki, in a way.
As I left them and headed down the hall, I ran into Urayasu and some of his buddies coming out of the bathroom. His hands were still wet, the skin red and raw around his knuckles. “Shit! That hurts!” he was muttering. As I walked by, I gave him a “you asshole” kind of look, but when I thought about it I realized I was just as much of an asshole. Maybe more. Urayasu had been mad about something, and that’s why he pulverized Nizaki. But what was my excuse for standing there watching them?
I didn’t give a damn about Nizaki one way or the other. He only bullied boys, so I was safe, and though he was cute enough in a way, he wasn’t my type. His bullying was carefully planned and totally vicious, but he wasn’t as violent about it as some of the other kids. There were meaner bullies who did worse things.
Then why had I let him get beat up without trying to help? Why had I stood by and watched him get smashed to a pulp?
Clearly, I wanted to see him suffer. Physically and psychologically.
Not that I had any particular reason. That’s just how I felt at the moment. Nizaki had bullied everyone else without ever having to pay the price, so this just seemed like the right time for him to get what was coming to him—as though it was finally his turn. I guess that’s just the way it is with bullying: what goes around comes around. There was this time in fourth grade when everybody in the class suddenly decided to pretend I didn’t exist. I never knew why, but I suppose there’s really no such thing as a reason when it comes to bullying. What goes around comes around. So I’m sure I just felt that the needle had spun and finally pointed at Nizaki.
But why do you suppose there’s bullying in the first place?
Because there’s not enough love, I guess.
Who doesn’t have enough love?
Me?
Everybody?
The whole world?
And not enough love for who?
For me?
For everyone?
For the world?
Or for Nizaki?
I have no idea.
Even now, I really don’t.
That evening, the day I first noticed Yoji Kaneda, I went home from school, had dinner, took a bath, and watched TV. Then at some point I wrote this sad little line in my diary: “Not enough love! Not near enough.”
Whose love? For who?
Who knew? Even now, I don’t know.
But some important stuff came out of all this: I found Yoji Kaneda, I started thinking about love for the first time in my life, and I had drilled into my brain the image of that pale, slender arm extending out of that blue polo shirt, reaching out for Nizaki as he lay there on the floor, bawling his eyes out in front of everybody.
Still, I didn’t suddenly feel like I was head-over-heels, out-of-my-mind in love with Yoji.
Like I said before, he was a bit of a lightweight. He was like a baby monkey, always doing this weird stuff. To be honest, he wasn’t exactly the type of guy who was likely to be a love object for a sixth-grade girl on the brink of puberty. Not the type at all.
And after the Nizaki incident, it was mostly that dumbass side of Yoji that I saw around school. Once during a soccer game in gym class, he suddenly turned on his own team and kicked a goal into their net, winning the game for the other side. His teammates chased him around, and somehow he wound up on the roof of the gym. The coach was madder than hell when he found out. And once on a field trip to one of those deer parks, he tried to bring a fawn on the bus. When they told him he couldn’t, the poor thing ran after the bus halfway back to school. Then there was the time when a bunch of his buddies were goofing off in class, scribbling stuff on each others’ faces, and the teacher made Yoji stand in the hall during free period with “toilet” on his forehead, “hot dog” on one cheek, and “Nagoya” on the other.
Way dumb.
Around that same time, I started reading grown-up magazines like Olive and Seventeen, started shaving my legs and armpits and plucking my brows. A boy who acted like that wouldn’t have made much of an impression. Still, he was always somewhere in the back of my mind, even as I was only registering his dumbass side.
I guess it was true even then. Whenever I wasn’t in class, I was looking for him—during free period or when we were mopping the halls, on the way to school or on the way home. At the time I think I told myself that he was always good for a laugh, that I just wanted to see the next stupid thing he would do. I guess I paid so much attention to him because that expectation was so often rewarded.
But whatever.
One of the necessary conditions for falling in love is that you simply see the other person often enough. If you see him enough, you begin to notice his good qualities.
Good qualities?
He’s an asshole and a goofball.
He seems to have a need to be noticed. (Which is something I hate.)
He’s loud. (Which is another thing I hate.)
And he’s short.
Oh, did I forget to mention that? I’m on the tall side, and by sixth grade I was already five feet three inches and completely uninterested in any boy who wasn’t at least my height. So you can see that there was no chance I’d fall for a runt like Kaneda. None.
But somehow I did.
It didn’t matter that he was a short, loud, conspicuous asshole clown. Somehow I was suddenly flipped by the hand of “love,” by that pale arm.
But how?
How did that one word, love, and that one outstretched arm so totally get to me?
Was I that desperate?
I don’t think so. I really don’t.
Or was I? After all, I did write those words in my diary: “Not enough love! Not near enough.” But that was about bullying—not about romance.
But love isn’t selective like that; it’s universal, all-encompassing.
That last bit was Kerstin, who had reappeared again from somewhere.
So Yoji was reaching his hand out to you too, as someone who was part of Nizaki’s world. Deep down, you know it instinctively—that if you grabbed hold of that hand and held on to it, you could have gone to a “Love will save the world” kind of place.
That’s nonsense.
It’s not, and we’re not talking about Kaneda when he was a kid.
So I’m not in love with Yoji in a romantic way? I just want someone to save me from my world?
Not “just.” Though that is part of it.
Part of it? What else is there?
Well, there’s “liking.”
“Liking”?
It makes no sense to ask what “liking” is; it’s a meaningless question.
I’m lost.
“Like” is “like”—that’s all. There’s no reason about it. No other side to the story. “I like it here.” “I like this kind of place.” You can say those kinds of things, but you can’t say, “I like it because there is this place” or “I like it because there is such a place.”
I still don’t follow.
Because I don’t know how to say it right. But you know what I mean.
I do.
That’s right.
I had watched Yoji doing all that stupid stuff and told myself over and over what an idiot he was, yet somehow, still, I fell in love with him.
There was no particular reason—just opportunity.
That slender, pale, outstretched hand.
Such a beautiful hand.
And the “Love will save the world” part.
But I’m pretty sure that when somebody falls in love, it’s not about this quality or that habit or this feeling or doing something that way—you fall in love with something that’s deep inside the other person, like a core or a nucleus, right at the heart, no strings attached. I know, you see, because Yoji’s core stuck inside me, and it won’t come off.
3
I thought about skipping school, but I didn’t want to be behind the curve when Sano started spreading his lies. I wanted to be ready to respond, to make my case early and often. Still, when I got to school it seemed as though he had got the jump on me with his texting. It was already too late. It would be brutal now.
As soon as I walked into the classroom, Kan and Shima stopped me. They had something they wanted to talk about, told me to come with them—and not out onto the balcony or on the stairs or in the hall in front of the art room, but in the bathroom. Which I knew was scary, but before I could even answer, Narucchi and Miyon and Nakajima and even Maki had followed us in and gathered around the mirror. Narucchi and Maki weren’t even at the party last night. If Kan and Shima were bringing in girls who had nothing to do with anything, this wasn’t some little thing; this was a big deal. And then there was Maki. Major scary. If she was here, I was in for the full treatment.
But why was she here?
They were planning to do it right. No, I didn’t really know whether they were all after me. But if they were, I was pretty sure there wasn’t much I could do about it.
