I Want to Eat Your Pancreas

by Yoru Sumino

  “I’d appreciate that,” I said. “But I get the feeling you’d say you enjoy being with people because relationships are so complicated.”

  She laughed and laughed. “That does sound like something I’d say. Yeah, I guess I might think that. All right, I take back what I said about the labels. You understand me, don’t you?”

  I almost said I didn’t, but I stopped myself. I thought maybe I did understand her—and I had an idea why.

  “Because we’re opposites,” I said.

  “We’re opposites?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I figure if it’s an idea I would never think, then it might be something you do. I tried one out, and I got it right.”

  “Tricky. Did you learn to think like that from your books?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  We were of two opposing viewpoints. Normally, we wouldn’t have any need or expectation of having anything to do with each other.

  Until just a few months ago, our only connection was that we inhabited the same classroom, and our only point of contact was her raucous laughter springing into my ears. She made such a racket that, despite my disinterest in other people, I immediately recalled her name when I saw her in the hospital that day. Being my opposite, she must have made an impression.

  She drank her café au lait while intermittently—and needlessly—offering her reactions (“Yum!”). I drank my black coffee in silence.

  “You might be onto something,” she said, “about us being opposites. At the yakiniku place, you kept eating flank and sirloin. But the whole point of going to yakiniku is to try different cuts.”

  “I tried them. I liked them more than I expected to, but I’ll stick with normal meat. Deliberately eating a living being’s organs—that sounds kind of monstrous, doesn’t it? So does dumping all that sugar and milk into coffee, when it’s already perfect as it is.”

  “I don’t think our outlook on food matches up.”

  “Not just about food,” I said.

  We sat in the coffee shop for about another hour. Nothing else we talked about was of any importance. We didn’t talk about life, death, illness, or our time left in this world. So then, what did we talk about? Mostly, she talked about our classmates. I assumed she was trying to get me to take interest in them, but I could safely say her experiment ended in failure.

  The attempt was hopeless from the start. I wasn’t about to take interest in my classmates or their simplistic love stories. I knew of tales far less boring and mundane. Surely she must have noticed how I felt, as I wasn’t the type of person who could hide his boredom. Still, that she tried so hard to sway me was itself of some mild interest. I wouldn’t have wasted my efforts like that. Why try hammering a nail into rice?

  Then, when we both started feeling like it was time to go, I asked her a question that had been on my mind.

  “What are you going to do with that rope? You’re not going to kill yourself, right? You said something about a practical joke?”

  “That’s right, though I won’t be around to see how it goes off. You’ll have to see for me. I’m going to hint about the rope in my journal. Whoever finds it will get tricked into thinking I must have been so distraught that I considered suicide. That’s the prank.”

  “That’s bad taste is what it is.”

  “It’ll be fine, don’t worry. I’ll be sure to write that it’s not true. I won’t leave them hanging.”

  Letting that one pass by, I said, “I’m not sure that makes up for it, but it’s better than nothing.”

  This utterly alien way of thinking had me feeling both exasperated and amused. I wouldn’t spare any thought to how people would react after I was dead and gone.

  We left the coffee shop and made our way back into the station and its jostling crowds. We got on our train, where we stood and talked a little, then we were back in our town.

  We’d both taken our bicycles to the train station, and we retrieved them from the free bicycle parking area and rode back to the school, where we waved and parted ways.

  She said, “Talk to you tomorrow.” I didn’t think we would talk the next day, as we didn’t have library duty, but I said, “Sure.”

  I took the same way home as I always did, and as I would many times again. But something felt odd. An inescapable fear toward death and erasure had stirred up inside me recently, but now the fear had calmed, if only by a little. All day, the impression my classmate gave off had been so far from death. Maybe death seemed less real to me now.

  Starting that day, I had just a little bit of trouble believing she was going to die.

  At home, I read a book, ate the dinner my mother made, took a bath, drank barley tea in the kitchen, greeted my father back from work, then returned to my room intending to read some more. That was when a text message arrived on my phone. I almost never used my phone to text, and when the message alert chimed, it almost seemed like a marvel. I flipped open the phone and saw the message was from her. I’d forgotten we exchanged numbers for the student librarian program.

  I flopped onto my bed and opened the text message. This is what it said:

  I thought I’d try texting you, I wonder if it’ll go through. Thanks for hanging out with me today! ✌️ I had so much fun.