by Yoru Sumino
She said, “[Cruel Classmate]-kun, you’ll catch a cold like that.”
I accepted her gesture of kindness, although I felt unworthy. Then she gasped.
“[Cruel Classmate]-kun! You’re bleeding.”
Looking upset, she took a handkerchief from her pocket and held it against my left brow. I hadn’t realized I was bleeding. I’d thought he’d struck me with his bare hands. Had he used a weapon? I wondered, although in that moment, I wasn’t interested in the details.
Instead, I looked at his face. He was still standing in the same place as before, having been passed by as she ran over to me. Words couldn’t describe how drastically his expression had changed. I’d read the description “overflowing with emotion” before, and now I’d seen firsthand what those words meant.
She was saying, “What happened to you?” and, “Why are you bleeding?” and so on. I was ignoring her, not intentionally, but because his expression had completely captured my attention. He answered her for me.
“Sakura…” he said. “What are you doing with someone like that?”
Keeping her handkerchief pressed against my brow, she looked over her shoulder at him. When he saw her face, he grimaced again.
She said, “Someone like that…? You mean [Cruel Classmate]-kun?”
“Yeah, him,” he said, his tone defensive. “He’s been hanging on to you, so I took care of him. He won’t be bothering you anymore.”
Maybe he believed she’d think better of him now. Maybe he wanted to her to notice him again. But he couldn’t see what she was thinking.
I had now completely taken on the role of observer, and all I could do was watch the scene unfold. She had frozen, her gaze on him with one arm raised to keep the handkerchief on my forehead. He had on a half-smile, like a child awaiting his praise. The other half was scared.
A few seconds later, the fear took over the rest of his face.
Finally, she spoke a single word, as if all her emotions had coalesced into a ball in her gut that needed spitting out.
“Creep.”
He looked dumbstruck.
She immediately turned to me, and her face took me by surprise. I’d thought she possessed a wide range of emotions, but that they all held at least an element of cheerfulness. Even when she was angry, even when she cried, her expression was never dark. I had been wrong.
This was a look I hadn’t seen from her before. It was a look intended to wound.
When she looked back at me, her expression quickly transformed into a smile mixed with uncertainty. She helped me to my feet. My pants and shirt were soaked through, but at least this was still summer, and I wasn’t cold. The summer air kept me warm, as did her hand on my arm.
I picked up my bag. She pulled me along as she walked in the boy’s direction. I looked at his face; seeing him so crestfallen, I didn’t think he’d be stealing any of my belongings anymore.
We walked past him, and I thought she’d keep propelling me forward, so when she suddenly stopped, I nearly collided into her back. Our umbrellas knocked into each other and sent fat water drops falling.
Without turning, she spoke in a voice that was somehow simultaneously quiet and loud.
“I don’t like you anymore, Takahiro. Don’t ever do anything else to me or anyone around me again.”
The boy she’d called Takahiro said nothing. I looked at him one last time; he was facing away from us now. He seemed to be crying.
She dragged me all the way back to her house. We went inside but didn’t speak, aside from her handing me a towel and a change of clothes and telling me to take a shower. I did just that.
Until I’d borrowed the clothing—a men’s T-shirt, boxer shorts, and track pants—I hadn’t known she had a brother several years older than her. I didn’t even know who was in her family.
After I changed clothes, she called me into her bedroom. She was sitting formally on her floor.
It was there that we did something I’d never done before. As I rarely associated with others, I didn’t know what to call two people trying to speak openly and honestly with each other.
She called the process “making up.”
Of all the human interactions I’d experienced before this point, this was the one that most made me itch with embarrassment.
She apologized to me. I apologized to her. She explained that when she hugged me, she thought I would look uncomfortable but then laugh. So I explained that for a reason I didn’t understand, I felt like she was making a fool of me, and I got angry. She said she came after me in the rain because she didn’t want to let things stay bad between us, and she had cried when I pushed her over purely because she was afraid of a man’s physical strength.
I apologized from the bottom of my heart.
During our talk, I brought up the boy we’d left in the rain because I was still curious about him. My conjecture proved correct: The class representative had been her most recent boyfriend. I told her what I had thought as the rain poured onto me—that she was better off with somebody who had genuine feelings for her. We had only encountered each other in the hospital by pure chance.
As soon as I said that, she admonished, “You’re wrong. It wasn’t chance. Everyone is where they are because of the choices they’ve made. Our choices led us to being in the same class. Our choices brought us to the hospital. Not chance. There’s no such thing as fate. All the choices you’ve made and all the choices I’ve made brought us together. You and I met by our own decisions.”
I was silent. There was nothing I could say. I was amazed at how much I learned from her. If she had more than a year left to live—if she could somehow live longer—how much more could she teach me, after everything I’d already learned? I was certain that no amount of time would have been enough.
I borrowed a plastic bag for my wet clothes, along with the fresh clothes on my back and the book she’d promised me. I informed her that I read my books in the order in which I obtained them, and a number were ahead on the queue. She told me I could just return the book to her in a year, and I agreed. In not so many words, I made the promise that we would keep getting along as long as she lived.
The next day, I returned to school for the first day of summer school. My slippers were where they were supposed to be.
When I went to class, she wasn’t there. When first period started, she still hadn’t come. Nor was she there the next hour, or the one after that. Even after the school day was over, I hadn’t seen her.
That night, I learned why.
She had been hospitalized.
Six
I didn’t see her until the Saturday of that week in her hospital room. It was morning, and the clouds were keeping the heat at bay. She’d texted me the hospital’s visiting hours, and I left to see her—although to say I went wouldn’t quite be right; rather, I had been summoned.
She had a private room. When I arrived, no one else was visiting her, and she was standing by her window, facing outside. She wore a standard hospital pajama set and had a tube hanging from her arm, and she was performing a bizarre dance. I called to her from behind, and she made a startled little jump, then fled shrieking to her bed and burrowed herself under the blankets. I sat on a folding chair beside her bed and waited for her to calm down. All at once, she became quiet and sat up as if nothing had happened. Her mercurial nature wasn’t bound by time or place.
She said, “You can’t just show up without warning me like that. I thought I’d die of embarrassment.”
“If you managed to be the first person in history to die that way, at least I’d have a funny story to tell for the rest of my life. Here, I brought you a present.”
“What?” she exclaimed. “You didn’t have to. Oh, strawberries! Let’s eat them together. There are plates and stuff in that cabinet over there. Why don’t you grab what we need?”
As asked, I retrieved a knife and a pair of plates and forks from a white cabinet against the wall and returned to the bedside folding chair. I’d bou
ght the strawberries with money my mom gave me when I told her I’d be visiting a classmate in the hospital.
I cut the stems from the strawberries and began eating as I asked her how she was doing.
She said, “I’m completely fine. Some of my numbers were a little off, and my parents got all worked up and put me in the hospital, but it’s nothing. I’ll be in here for a couple weeks while they pump me full of some special medicine, and then I’ll be back in school.”
“Our extra classes will be pretty much over by then. We’ll be on summer break for real.”
“Oh, right. You and I will have to make some plans, then.”
My eyes followed the tube from her arm to a metal pole on casters with a hanging pouch filled with clear liquid. A question came to me, and I asked it.
“What are you telling everyone—like your best friend, Kyōko-san?”
“I’m telling them I’m having my appendix removed. The hospital staff are going along with the story. Now that I’ve seen how worried my friends are about me, it’s even harder to imagine telling them the truth. But I don’t know, maybe I should ask the guy who pushed me onto my bed a few days ago what to do. So, what do you think, [Boy I’m Getting along With]-kun?”
“I think you should at least come clean with Best Friend-san—I mean Kyōko-san, but then again, I guess I should trust the decision of the girl who threw her arms around me a few days ago.”
“Don’t remind me! You’re making me embarrassed again. I’m going to tell Kyōko you pushed me over. I don’t want you to cause any trouble when she comes to kill you.”
“You’d make your best friend a killer? That’s twisted.”
She made a face at me and shrugged. She was the same as always.
She’d told me she was fine over text, but I was relieved to see her acting as lively as ever. I’d feared her illness had progressed faster than expected and that she’d run out of time. But as far as I could tell from looking at her, that wasn’t the case. Her expression was bright, and she moved with energy.
Feeling reassured, I opened my school bag and took out a brand-new notebook.
“Now that we’ve had our snack,” I said, “it’s time to study.”
“What? C’mon, can’t we just sit around a while first?”
“I came here because you asked me to help you study. Besides, all you’ve been doing here is sitting around.”
I had a proper justification to come visit, beyond just seeing her. She’d asked me to take notes for her in class over the past several days then catch her up on the review lessons she’d missed. When I promptly replied that I would, she acted surprised that I was being so agreeable. How rude.
I handed her the blank notebook and a pen and gave her a summary of the summer school classes, shortening the lessons by cutting out the parts I didn’t think she needed to bother learning. For her part, she listened attentively. Including breaks, my mock class was over in about an hour and a half.
“Thanks,” she said. “You know, [Boy I’m Getting along With]-kun, you’re great at teaching. You should become a teacher.”
“No thanks. Why do you keep suggesting jobs for me where I have to deal with other people?”
“Maybe I just want you to do the things I would be doing if I didn’t have to die.”
“Don’t say that. That makes me the bad guy every time I reject your suggestions.”
She giggled and placed the notebook on a brown shelf beside her bed, where magazines and manga stood in a row. Being hospitalized must have been tremendously boring for such an active person. The boredom may even drive her to perform bizarre dances.
The time was just before noon. She’d told me her best friend was coming in the afternoon, and I had already decided I’d leave before then. When I told her as much, she said, “Aw, you could stay and join in our girl talk,” but I politely declined. I’d worked up an appetite playing at being a teacher, and I’d already accomplished what I’d set out to do for the day, which was to make sure she was all right.
“Before you go,” she said, “let me show you a magic trick.”
“You learned one already?”
“Just a basic one. I’ve got others I’m already practicing, though.”
She’d chosen a card trick—one of those where I pick a card and she names it without looking. For how little time she’d had to practice, she was good at it. Having never studied magic myself, I wasn’t able to figure out how the trick worked.
She said, “I’ll do something tougher next time, so look forward to it.”
“I will look forward to it. Maybe your last act will be escaping from a box that’s on fire.”
“Like escaping from the crematorium? I won’t be pulling that one off.”
“Yes, that was the joke.”
“Sakuraaa,” called a cheerful voice from the doorway. Reflexively, I looked over my shoulder. “How are you—oh. You again.”
The best friend had come striding into the hospital room, but when she noticed me, she halted and scowled. She seemed to be getting more openly hostile toward me. If things kept going as they were, I didn’t see how I would fulfill the girl’s request that I get along with her best friend after her death.
I rose from the chair, said a quick goodbye, and began leaving. The best friend was glaring at me, and I made an effort to avoid her gaze. I’d watched a nature program last night that said to never look a wild animal in the eyes.
Just when I was feeling optimistic that I’d be able to sneak out without any mutual interference between me and the beast, the girl on the bed remembered something outrageous and said it.
“[Boy I’m Getting along With]-kun,” she called to me. “That reminds me, did you bring my brother’s boxers and pants—you know, the ones I let you borrow?”
I had never cursed my carelessness as much as I did in that moment. I had brought her brother’s clothes in my bag with the intention of returning them.
But there was nothing I could possibly say now.
I turned around to see her grinning. Her friend beside her looked aghast. I did my best to appear composed as I took the plastic bag containing the clothes from my school bag and handed them to her.
“Thanks,” she said. Still grinning devilishly, she looked back and forth between me and her friend.
Just once, I glanced at the friend, perhaps out of some foolish impulse—the primitive desire to look at something terrifying. The friend had already gotten rid of the astonished look, replacing it with a glare that could kill. Maybe I was imagining things, but I thought I heard her growling like a lion.
I immediately looked away from the best friend and scurried out of the room. Just before I crossed the doorway, I heard the friend beginning her interrogation with a harshly whispered, “Boxers?”
Not wanting to get embroiled in any further trouble, I quickened my pace.
***
When the next week came, and I went to school on Monday as I was supposed to, a ludicrous rumor about me was running rampant throughout the class.
My classmates had somehow gotten it their heads that I was stalking the girl. I found out from the boy who was now in the habit of offering me gum. When I scowled at the sheer stupidity of the idea, he seemed amused and, yes, offered me gum. I politely declined.
I tried imagining the sequence of events that had led to the rumor. Almost certainly, several classmates had seen us together on different occasions, and they’d concluded I was always hanging around where she was. My peers, who generally considered me unpleasant, decided I was a malicious stalker. That was the best my imagination could do, but I thought I was close to what had happened.
However the rumor had started, it was ridiculous and entirely ungrounded in reality. And they all believed it. Disgusting. Almost everyone in class was looking at me and whispering about how I was a stalker and they needed to watch out.
I’ll say it again: They disgusted me completely. Why did they believe their mob mentality was right by default?
I’d bet that if thirty of them got together, they could murder someone and not even care. People who believed they were on the right side were capable of any deed. They didn’t even realize they were acting like cogs in a machine and not individual people with humanity.
I wondered if they would escalate to bullying me, but that was me being overly self-conscious. Ultimately, our classmates’ attentions were on her. Me hanging off her didn’t change that. And I wasn’t hanging off her, anyway.
They had no need to bother themselves with taking any action against me, and they had nothing to gain from doing so either. The only one who had any real interest in me was the best friend, who glared at me every day as she came into class. Being marked as her enemy was scary.
On Tuesday, I paid my second visit to the girl in the hospital, and when I reported the rumors to her, she clutched her hands to her pancreas and burst into laughter.
She said, “Oh, [Boy I’m Getting along With]-kun, you’re all so hilarious.”
“You think spreading malicious rumors behind peoples’ backs is amusing? I didn’t know you were so cruel.”
“What’s amusing is that nobody has any idea what to do with you. Do you even know why you’re in that mess right now?”
I offered, “Because I’m spending time with you?”
“Trying to blame me, eh?” she said. She was sitting on her bed peeling a mandarin orange. “Wrong. They distrust you because you don’t talk to them. They don’t know what kind of person you are, [Boy I’m Getting along With]-kun. That’s why they make those assumptions about you. If you want to put a stop to this, I think you’re just going to have to make friends with them.”
Neither I nor my classmates needed that. Once she was gone, I’d be alone again, and they would forget about me.
She said, “I think if they got to know who you were, they’d understand how fun you are. Besides, I don’t believe they really think you’re a bad person.”
As I peeled my orange, I thought, That’s a dumb thing to say.
