by Yoru Sumino
I felt a sting of pain, like a needle driven into the back of my heart. What hurt was knowing I could give her no such thing. If I had anything to offer her at all, it was an escape, and I wasn’t sure I even gave her that.
I said, “Like I told you before, I’m not that special.”
“Whatever,” she said. “Don’t you think we must look like a couple?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m just saying.” She cheerfully put a forkful of chocolate cake into her mouth. She really didn’t look like someone who was going to die soon.
That’s when I realized—
Nobody outside a terminal ward looks like they’re going to die. Me, her, that person who got killed the day before—we were all alive yesterday. We were living our lives, not behaving as if we were going to die. Maybe that’s what it meant to value every day the same.
I was lost in my thoughts when she scolded me, “Don’t look so serious. You’re going to die, too. We’ll meet again in heaven.”
“You’re right,” I said.
Getting emotional over her life was conceited. I’d been arrogant to believe I was guaranteed to outlive her.
She said, “So you’d better be like me and stock up on good deeds.”
“Maybe I’ll take up Buddhism after you die.”
“And just because I’m dead, don’t think I’ll let you get away being with another girl!”
“Sorry,” I said. “You’re just a casual fling.”
She roared that delighted laugh.
We stuffed ourselves with all the food we wanted, then paid separately, left the restaurant, and decided to go home for the day. Dessert Paradise was a bit of a walk from our school; typically, I’d have covered that distance by bike, but going to our respective homes to retrieve our bikes would have taken too much time and effort, and she had suggested we walk straight to the restaurant, still in our school uniforms.
On our way back, we walked briskly on the sidewalk along the main road together. The sun was out, though no longer directly overhead.
“Hot weather can be nice sometimes,” she said. “This could be my last summer, so I’d better enjoy it to the fullest. I wonder what we should do next… When you hear summer, what’s the first thing you picture?”
“Watermelon popsicles,” I replied.
She laughed. I was getting the idea she laughed a lot.
“Besides watermelon,” she said. “What else?”
“Shaved ice.”
“That’s, like, the same thing!”
“All right,” I said, “when you hear summer, what do you think?”
“The usual things, I guess: the seaside, fireworks, festivals. A summer’s aventure!” The accent was back, although this time it was French.
“Are we going hunting for gold?”
“Gold? What are you talking about?”
I explained, “Aventure—that’s French for ‘adventure,’ isn’t it?”
She affected a sigh and turned both palms to the sky as she shook her head. Making a display of being disgusted with me was one thing, but what an annoying way of doing it.
“Not that kind of adventure,” she said. “Come on. Summer, adventure; you know what I’m talking about.”
“Waking up early and going bug catching?”
“That settles it. You’re an idiot.”
I replied, “I think it’s a bigger idiot who gets romance in her head just because the season changed.”
“So you did know what I was talking about! Agh!”
She glared at me. I was sweating enough already, so I reflexively looked away.
She said, “Can you stop being so difficult and quit dragging this out longer than it has to be? It’s too hot out.”
“I thought you said the heat was nice.”
She pushed past my remark. “A summer’s fleeting romance. A summer’s mistake. I’m a teenage girl, so I figure I ought to have one or two of those, right?”
Fleeting or not, a mistake didn’t sound like a very good idea to me.
“As long as I’m still alive,” she said, “I should experience love.”
“You’ve had three boyfriends already. Haven’t you experienced it enough?”
“The heart isn’t measured by a number,” she said.
“That’s one of those things that sounds deep at first, but if you think about it a while, it doesn’t make any sense. What you really mean is, you want another boyfriend.”
I’d said that lightly enough, but if I expected her to respond with another joke, I was wrong.
She stopped walking and stood still, as if struck by a thought. Since she’d done so without warning, my momentum carried me another five steps before I turned to see why she had stopped. I wondered if maybe she saw a hundred-yen coin on the ground or something, but no, her eyes were locked on me. She’d moved her arms behind her back, and her long hair fluttered in the breeze.
“What is it?” I asked.
“If I said I really did want another boyfriend, how far would you go to help me?”
She looked as if she was testing me, like she was trying to make her expression deeply meaningful.
As for what that expression meant, or what her words meant, I was too unaccustomed to being around other people to know.
“How far would I go?”
“Never mind,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s all right.”
She started walking again. When we were side-by-side, I glanced over to see her expression, but it had reset to her usual happy face, which left me even further away from any understanding.
“Was that a joke?” I asked. “Like, were you going to ask if I could set you up with one of my nonexistent friends?”
“No, that wasn’t it,” she said, flatly refuting the only explanation I could think of.
“Well, what did you mean?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Life isn’t a novel—if you think everything I say has to mean something, you’re seriously mistaken. It didn’t mean anything. You should really spend some more time around people, you know.”
“Oh, okay.”
Apparently, I was supposed to accept that, but it didn’t make sense to me. If her question didn’t mean anything, then why did she say my guess was wrong? But the boat of reeds didn’t raise the point. Something about her manner signaled we were finished talking about the matter, though with my inexperience, I couldn’t be sure if I was picking up on the right message.
When we parted ways outside our school, she waved goodbye to me and called, “I’ll let you know when I’ve come up with the next plan.”
I didn’t bother asking when I’d lost any say in the matter. Instead, I waved back and turned to go. If you’ve already eaten the poison, you may as well lick the plate.
All the way back home, I thought about our bewildering exchange, but I came no closer to understanding what she’d meant.
I figured I’d be dead before I understood.
Four
I interpreted Living with Dying not as a journal, but as an account of her life; a record of the things she did and felt so they would remain after she was gone. From what I gathered, she’d come up with a set of rules, a framework for what she would and wouldn’t document.
The ones I knew were as follows:
First, she didn’t write in it every day. She only included days where something special happened, or when she felt something special; something she considered worthy of leaving a remnant behind.
Second, Living with Dying only contained written words. She seemed to regard things like pictures or graphs as being out of place in the paperback-like book. On its pages, she wrote prose in black ink and nothing else.
Third, she had decided to keep her book private until after her death. As long as she was alive, her writings were for no one’s eyes but hers—except for the single page revealed to me through her carelessness.
She instructed her parents to make the book available, after her death, to every
one who was close to her. Whatever her current use of the book was—whether she considered it a diary or anything else—if it was to be passed on and read after her death, then from my point of view, the book wasn’t a journal, but a memoir, or would become one after her passing.
While she was alive, her writings weren’t meant to impart an influence or be influenced by anyone. But just once, I asked her to change it for me.
I told her I didn’t want her to write my name anywhere in her book. My reason was simple: I didn’t want to be unnecessarily hassled or pried by her family and friends once they read it.
One day, as we were working in the library, she told me, “All kinds of people show up in my book.” When I requested she leave my name out, she said, “It’s my book, and I can write what I want.” She had a point, so I didn’t fight it. Then she added, “Telling me you don’t want me to just makes me want to do it more.”
I resigned myself to the hassle that would follow her death.
I thought my name might have possibly made an appearance alongside the yakiniku and the dessert buffet, but the two days that followed were free of that danger.
That was because, for those two days, we didn’t speak at school. There wasn’t anything weird about it, our typical routines just didn’t give us any cause to interact. If anything, the days where we went out to eat together were the anomalies.
I went to school, took my exams, and quietly went home. Every now and then I felt the eyes of her friends and her social group upon me, but I decided I didn’t need to let that bother me.
For two days, nothing truly special happened. If I had to, I could think of two minor incidents. The first was when I was sweeping the hallway at school in silence.
A male classmate, who typically never even gave me a glance, came up to me and said, “Yo, [Unremarkable Classmate], are you dating Yamauchi?”
His bluntness was almost refreshing. For a moment, I suspected he might be mad at me because he had a thing for her and misunderstood what was going on. But from his demeanor I surmised he wasn’t. His expression was cheerful, unclouded by any hostility. He seemed like a big ball of impulsive curiosity.
“No,” I replied. “Definitely not.”
“Really? But you guys went on a date, didn’t you?”
“We just happened to go out for lunch, that’s all.”
“What, really?”
“Why do you care so much?” I asked.
“Huh?” he replied. “Oh, you don’t think I like her or somethin’, do ya? No way! I’m into the quieter types.”
I hadn’t asked, but that hadn’t dissuaded him from blabbering away without a care. At least we agreed on one point: She wasn’t a quiet type.
He said, “So I heard wrong, then. The whole class is talkin’ about it, you know.”
“They’re wrong. Let them talk.”
Then he asked, “Oh! Hey, you want any gum?”
“No,” I said. “But could you bring me the dustpan?”
“On it.”
I thought he’d say no, seeing as he always slacked off when it was time to clean up, but to my surprise, he did as I’d asked with no fuss. Maybe he just didn’t get the general concept of our school cleaning time, and all he needed was to be told what to do.
He didn’t ask me any other questions after that. And that was the first unusual event of those two days.
Talking to that classmate hadn’t been a good or bad experience, but the second unusual event—minor as it was—put me in a slightly depressed mood.
The bookmark I’d inserted into my current book went missing.
Luckily, I remembered my place without it, but the bookmark wasn’t one of the free ones handed out at bookstores, it was a thin and plastic souvenir from a museum. I didn’t know when I’d lost it, but my own carelessness must have been at fault. I didn’t have anyone to blame, and for the first time in a while, I felt down.
And so, aside from feeling down about something that was ultimately trivial, those two days were normal. Normal for me was peaceful, which meant I didn’t have a dying girl hanging around me.
The prologue to the destruction of my respite came on Wednesday night. I was thoroughly enjoying my return to normalcy when the text message arrived.
Even after I read it, I didn’t realize the full extent of the disruption about to occur. Whether I liked it or not, I was a character in this new story, and the first chapter was coming. Only the reader could flip ahead and see where the chapter was set. The characters knew nothing.
This was the message:
We made it through the exams! No test and no school tomorrow!
