by Yoru Sumino
“As if!” she said. She released my right arm, brushed away my hand, and kept on laughing.
“Oh my God, I’m so embarrassed. That was a joke. A joke! Another prank. Don’t be so serious. You made me feel embarrassed.”
Her outburst left me dumbfounded.
She was still talking. “That took a lot of courage. To just throw myself at you like that, I mean. But a prank needs to be grounded in reality, you know? Yep, that took guts for me. And when you didn’t say anything, it was like you thought it was real. Did you get nervous? I’m glad I made sure you weren’t interested in me—otherwise that could have gotten too real just now! Well, I pulled it off anyhow. The prank only worked because it was you. Oh, what a thrill that was.”
For the first time since meeting her, I felt true anger at her. I didn’t understand why this was what finally triggered that reaction, but it had.
The girl was still talking, as if to chase away the embarrassment she’d brought upon herself. The rage I felt slowly took form inside me, until it was more than could be melted away on its own.
Who did she think I was? I felt like she was making a mockery of me. Maybe she was.
If this was what associating with other people was like, then I had been right to never want to socialize with anyone. They could all get a pancreatic disease and die for all I cared. Then I had an even better idea: I would eat all their pancreases. I was the only righteous one.
I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed her onto the bed.
She shouted, but I didn’t hear. Anger had blocked all sound from my ears.
I pressed her upper body to the bed, then let go of her shoulders and grabbed her arms, holding her there. My mind was blank. I wasn’t thinking anything.
When she realized what had happened, she wriggled a little bit to try and get free, but she soon gave up and looked up at my face, now casting its shadow upon her. I still didn’t know what my expression must have looked like.
Sounding confused, she said, “[Boy I’m Getting along With]-kun? What are you doing? Let go. You’re hurting me.”
I said nothing. I just looked her in the eyes.
“That was just a little joke,” she said. “I was only playing around, like I always do.”
I didn’t know what would satisfy my anger. I couldn’t comprehend myself.
While I remained mute, her expressive face went through a range of emotions she’d learned to display over a lifetime of social interactions.
She grinned. “Ah ha,” she said, “you’ve decided to play along with my joke. You’re a good sport. All right, that’s enough now, let me go.”
She started to look worried. “Come on, what’s wrong? This isn’t like you, [Boy I’m Getting along With]-kun. You don’t play tricks on people. Right? Let me go.”
She got angry. “Enough is enough! Do you think you can do this to a girl? Let me go now!”
I kept staring at her, my eyes as dispassionate as I could make them. She didn’t look away. As we gazed into each other’s eyes atop the bed, the scene was almost dreamlike.
Finally, she stopped saying anything. The loud rain outside her window sounded like condemnation. I could hear her breathing—I could even hear her blinks—and they seemed to be questioning me.
I kept staring at her, and she kept looking at me.
And then I saw it.
She had gone silent, her expression still, and tears had welled in her eyes.
As soon as I saw them, my anger vanished like it had never been there. I didn’t know where the emotion went; I didn’t even know where it came from.
In place of that bitter feeling came a growing regret.
Gently—as if that mattered now—I released her arms and stood. She looked up at me, bewildered. I don’t know how she looked after that, because I couldn’t bear to look at her again.
“Sorry,” I said. She didn’t answer. She remained on the bed, just as I’d pinned her there.
I picked up my things from the floor where I’d left them, then put my hand on the doorknob to escape.
“[Cruel Classmate]-kun…”
Hearing her voice from behind, I froze for a moment then replied with my back to her.
“I’m sorry. I’m going home.”
I opened the door to her bedroom, which I’d probably never see again. Walking quickly, I fled. Nobody chased after me.
Out in the rain, I took a few steps before realizing my hair was getting soaked. I calmly opened my umbrella before walking into the street. The scent of summer rain drifted up from the asphalt.
As I traced my path back to the school, I scolded the part of me that wanted to look over my shoulder. The rain was getting stronger, pouring now.
Now that my head had cooled, I thought about what had happened.
But no matter how long I thought, the only answer I found was regret and total disappointment in myself. What had I done?
I didn’t know that directing my anger at another person could hurt them so badly. I didn’t know it could hurt me so badly.
Did you see her face? I scolded myself. Did you see her tears? That was her hurt pouring out.
My teeth ached, and I realized I’d been grinding them. I never thought the day would come when I inflicted physical pain on myself because of a relationship. I was going crazy. But I wasn’t so deluded as to consider this pain a penance. Pain wouldn’t absolve me of my crime.
Her prank was what made me angry; her joke had rubbed me the wrong way. That was the truth, but even so, that didn’t excuse the use of violence against her. It didn’t matter if she hurt me, whether or not she intended to.
Did she hurt me? I asked myself. How? What got hurt?
I recalled her smell and her heartbeat, but I didn’t know what those memories meant. All I knew was her insult was something I couldn’t let go. Acting out of irrational emotion, I had hurt her.
I walked the street lined with large detached homes. It was a weekday afternoon, and no one else was around.
If I was to suddenly disappear, no one would notice.
The quiet and the stillness of the street made the calm male voice calling my name from behind all the more startling.
“[Uninteresting Classmate]-kun.”
I turned around to see a classmate holding an umbrella. Until he spoke to me, I hadn’t noticed his presence at all. Two things puzzled me: One, that he talked to me; two, he had an intense expression, instead of the agreeable smile I thought of him as always wearing. He looked almost angry.
This was the second time we’d spoken in the same day. That rarely happened with anyone.
He was our class representative, and he always came off as cool-headed and genuine. Normally, he had no reason to interact with me, and I was curious why he did so now. I was still shaken from before, but I composed myself and said, “Hey.”
He just stared at me in silence. Seeing nothing to do but try again, I said, “So you live around here, huh?”
After a moment, he said, “No, I don’t.”
He was definitely in a bad mood. Maybe he hated the rain, too. The rain always meant the annoyance of having to carry more things around. Although right now he just had on his street clothes and was only carrying an umbrella.
I looked at his face. Lately, I was beginning to be able to perceive people’s emotional state from the look in their eyes. Hoping to find some clue as to why he would talk to me, even if doing so seemed to displease him, I met his stare.
I didn’t say anything else. I was juggling the efforts of inspecting his expression while keeping my own emotions in check, and he lost patience first. He gritted his teeth and spat my name as if it was a bitter-tasting bug in his mouth.
“What about you, [Uninteresting Classmate]? What are you doing around here?”
I wasn’t particularly bothered that he left off the “-kun” this time. What stuck with me was that he didn’t sound like he was calling me [Uninteresting Classmate]. How he said my name came off more like [Unforgivabl
e Person], or something like that. I didn’t understand why he would think that, but I decided to go with it until I knew more.
When I didn’t respond, he sneered and said, “What’s the matter, [Unforgivable Person], didn’t you hear me? I asked you what you’re doing here.”
“I had an errand.”
“It’s Sakura, isn’t it?”
Hearing that familiar name, my chest tightened. My breath caught in my throat, and I couldn’t speak right away. He wasn’t in the mood for waiting.
He repeated, “I said, it’s Sakura, isn’t it?”
I stayed mute.
“Say something!”
Grasping at some faint hope that he was mistaken, I said, “If by Sakura, you mean the girl in our class, then yes.”
He clenched his teeth, and in that moment, I knew beyond any doubt that his animosity was directed at me. I just didn’t know why he felt that way.
I tried to think it through, but quickly found the answer from the next thing he said.
“Why would Sakura,” he said, interrupted by his own heavy breathing. I waited. “Why would Sakura be with someone like you?”
Oh. I get it.
I almost spoke my revelation aloud but consciously decided not to. Now I knew what he felt. I scratched my head, uncomfortable. This was going to be tedious.
If only he’d stop and listen, I could talk my way around this in any number of ways, or possibly given him a proper explanation, but his misdirected anger had deprived him of reason.
I considered the possibility that we hadn’t run into each other today by accident. I could conceive countless scenarios; for instance, maybe he had tailed us from school.
He was probably in love with her. And now he was wrongly jealous of me. He’d lost the ability to observe with objectivity; he’d lost perspective. What else had he lost?
I decided to start with the tactic I saw as mostly likely to succeed: explaining the truth.
I said, “Our relationship isn’t what you think it is.”
Rage filled his eyes. This isn’t going well, I thought, but before I could say anything else, he pressed me further, this time his voice combative and loud, drowning out the rain.
“Then you tell me what the hell it is! You’re eating together, just the two of you, going on vacation, and today you went to her house alone. The whole class is talking about you. You’ve started clinging to her, out of nowhere.”
I was a little curious how word of our trip had gotten out.
I explained, “I wouldn’t say I’m clinging to her. I guess I’m not sure what I’d call it. If I said I was letting her go out with me, that would be too arrogant, but if I said she was letting me go out with her, that wouldn’t be giving myself enough credit.”
Noticing he had winced both times I said we were going out, I quickly clarified, “When I say we’re going out together, I don’t mean, like, going out going out. We’re not dating.” I shook my head. “In any case, what’s going on with me and her isn’t what you or the rest of our class thinks it is.”
“She’s spending time with you.”
After a moment, I said, “That’s right.”
His words dripped with hate. “With someone as sullen and antisocial as you.”
I didn’t have an argument there. I assumed that was how I came off, and maybe that was how I really was.
If he wanted to know why she would choose to spend her time with me, well, so did I. She’d told me I was the only person who could give her normalcy and reality. I believed her, but somehow that answer seemed insufficient.
I kept quiet. He glared at me intensely, but his expression remained frozen, and he just stood there in the rain.
The silence stretched long. So long, in fact, I thought our conversation must have been over. Maybe he had realized his rage was baseless, and he was overcome with regret just as I had been. Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he was still too angry to think.
I didn’t care which was true. Either way, neither of us had anything left to gain here. I thought if I turned my back and walked away, he’d just watch me go, so that’s what I did. Or maybe I simply wanted to be alone again as quickly as possible. I didn’t care which was true, my actions would have been the same.
If I’d truly stopped to think, I would have realized my only experience with people blinded by love were characters in my books. It was presumptuous to try and predict the actions of a living, breathing human being when I’d never had a true emotional connection with one before. Characters in a story weren’t like people in real life. Stories weren’t reality. Reality wasn’t as pretty.
I keenly felt his glare on my back as I walked away, but I didn’t turn to look. No one would have gained anything from that. I hoped that, by keeping my back to him, I would communicate how far-fetched it was that the girl could possibly be in love with someone who thought of human relationships as mathematical equations. The message probably didn’t get through.
I didn’t understand love wasn’t the only thing that could impair a man’s judgment; so could logic. Consequently, I didn’t realize he had followed me until his hand grabbed my shoulder.
“Wait!” he said.
I stopped and turned to look at him. Misunderstanding or not, I was getting tired of his attitude. I kept the annoyance from my expression.
“I’m not finished talking to you!” he said.
Maybe I was getting worked up, too. I’d never been in an altercation before—one person’s emotions butting against another’s. Looking back, I think in that moment, I had lost my capacity for rational thought.
Words came from my mouth with clearly no other purpose but to hurt him.
“Let me clue you in on something. It might do you some good.” I stared him in the eye and spoke with the intent of gutting him. “She hates clingy guys. I guess her previous boyfriend was that way.”
His expression contorted into something uglier than his earlier scowl. I didn’t know what the expression meant, but I didn’t care. Knowing wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
A strong impact struck me somewhere around my left eye. I stumbled backward, then fell butt-first onto the wet asphalt. The rain immediately seeped into my school uniform. My open umbrella clattered stupidly to the ground and rolled there. My school bag fell, too. With surprise and incomprehension, I looked up at him. I could barely see out of my left eye, the vision blurred.
Even though I didn’t know exactly what had happened, I understood I’d been the recipient of some sort of violence. A person doesn’t simply fall over of his own accord.
He shouted, “What do you mean, ‘clingy’? I… I…”
He was facing me, but I could plainly tell his words weren’t directed to me. I had incurred the wrath of a more powerful force. I had tried to hurt him but got hurt myself. I felt ashamed and deeply regretted what I had done.
This was my first time being punched, and it sure did hurt. I knew why I felt pain where he’d hit me, but I didn’t understand why I hurt on the inside, too. If the day kept going like this, I thought my heart might break.
Still sitting on the wet pavement, I looked up at him. My left eye still hadn’t recovered its vision.
Breathing heavily through his nose, this boy—who I guessed was probably her ex-boyfriend, although I didn’t know for sure at the time—looked down at me and said, “Someone like you has no right getting close to Sakura!”
He took something from his pocket and threw it at me. I uncrumpled the object and saw it was the bookmark I had lost. Now I could connect the dots.
“It was you,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
I had believed his handsome features were a reflection of his gentle nature. When he was guiding discussions at the front of the class, when he occasionally came to the library to borrow books, he had done so with an easygoing smile. But I’d only seen the image he carefully portrayed to the outside world, not what was in his heart. She had been right: What was real on the inside mattered, not
appearances.
I thought about what I should do. I had hurt him first; calling his reaction self-defense wasn’t that much of a stretch. Sure, he may have gone a bit too far, but I couldn’t know how deeply I’d hurt him, so getting to my feet and punching him back didn’t seem appropriate.
Standing above me, he still seemed incensed. I needed to calm him down but saying the wrong thing to him—or maybe even the right thing—may just throw more fuel onto the fire. I was the one who had pushed him over the edge already.
As we stared at each other, I began thinking he was more in the right than I was. He must have truly liked her. Maybe his methods were a little clumsy—or rather, they were the cause of his troubles—but he was honest about his feelings toward her, and he wanted to spend his time with her.
That’s why he hated me: for stealing time they could have spent together.
And what of me? If I had never learned she would be dead in a year, I never would have gone out to eat with her, traveled with her, or spoiled things between us at her house. Her death connected us, but death awaited everyone. What else had brought us together but random chance? We had been spending time together because of a fluke. He wanted to be with her out of genuine intent and emotion. I had no such claim.
Even with my social inexperience, I understood one basic truth: The one who was in the wrong must yield to the one who was in the right.
Okay, then. I would let him beat me until he was satisfied. It was my fault for trying to have a relationship with someone without understanding how other people’s feelings worked.
I met his glaring eyes in an attempt to signal, I yield. But the message didn’t get through.
A figure appeared, standing behind the heavily breathing boy.
The girl said, “What…is going on?”
He turned as if struck by lightning. His umbrella jostled and sent raindrops spilling onto his shoulders. I watched them as if I was a spectator, unsure if her arrival was good timing or bad.
Holding her umbrella, she looked back and forth between the class representative and me as she tried to piece together what was going on.
He looked about to say something, but before he could, she ran over to me. She picked up my umbrella and offered it.
