by Yoru Sumino
I said, “Except for you and Kyōko-san, they all think of me as [Unremarkable Classmate]—at best.”
She tilted her head, as if to drive home her point into the core of who I was. “Have you ever asked them?”
“I haven’t. But I still think they do.”
“You can’t know if you don’t ever ask. Until then, it’s only in your head. You might not be right.”
“I don’t care if I’m right or not. I don’t have anything to do with them, and it’s my head, anyway. It’s just what I think. I like to speculate what people think of me when they say my name.”
“How self-absorbed is that? Is that what you are—one of those self-absorbed guys?”
“No, I’m the self-absorbed prince, and I hail from the land of the self-absorbed. You ought to show me respect.”
Giving me a disinterested look, she hungrily ate her mandarin. I didn’t expect she would understand my point of view; she was my opposite, after all.
Human interaction was her life; her expressions and her nature told me as much. In contrast, aside from my family, all my interactions with other people began and ended in my head. I imagined if they liked or disliked me, but I didn’t particularly care which was true, as long as it didn’t lead me into harm. I had given up on social interactions from day one. I was her complete opposite; nobody needed me around. Although if someone were to ask me if I was fine with that, I might have had trouble answering.
Having finished her mandarin, she neatly folded the peel into a ball and tossed it into the waste bin. The peel made it in, and she clenched her hand into a triumphant fist.
She said, “So then, what do you think I think of you?”
“A boy you’re getting along with, I guess. Am I wrong?”
That was my honest answer, but she pursed her lips and said, “Wrong.” Then, more to herself, she added, “Although that used to be what I thought of you.”
I tilted my head quizzically. That was interesting phrasing. Did that mean instead of changing how she thought of me, she’d realized her feelings toward me were of a different nature than she’d first thought? My curiosity was piqued, if only by a little.
“All right,” I said. “Then how do you think of me?”
“If I told you, there’d be no fun in it. Friendship and romances are fun because you don’t know what you are to the other person.”
“So I was right—you do think that way.”
“Huh? Did we talk about this before?”
Maybe she really had forgotten. She brought her eyebrows together and made a puzzled, humorous expression. I laughed. A detached part of me observed myself being brought to genuine laughter by someone else. Partly suspicious, and partly impressed, I wondered when I had become that kind of person. I knew beyond any doubt the person who had caused that change was sitting in front of me. I doubted anyone could judge if the change was good or bad, but one thing was true: I had changed considerably.
Watching as I laughed, she narrowed her eyes and gently said, “I wish I could show everyone what an amazing person you are, [???]-kun.”
That was quite a thing to say to the boy who had pinned her down, even if I would regret doing so for the rest of my life.
I said, “Everyone else can wait—just show Kyōko-san for now. She scares me.”
“I’ve been trying to tell her. She’s just being a good friend and worrying for me, you know. She thinks you’re deceiving me.”
“There must be something wrong with your powers of communication. I mean, she seems smart enough to understand, anyway.”
“Whoa, such high praise.” She gasped. “Don’t tell me—you’re looking to make her your plaything after I’m dead? Tacky.”
I responded to her exaggerated reaction by giving her a disinterested look as I hungrily ate my mandarin. She shifted in bed as if that bored her, and I laughed again.
Then she said, “Time for today’s magic trick.”
This time, she’d practiced an illusion that involved manipulating a coin so it would disappear and reappear in her hands. The routine had a few hiccups, but just like last time, I thought she did an impressive job for a beginner—enough so that someone who didn’t know anything about magic, like me, might wonder if she possessed a special talent for it.
She explained, “Well, all I do is practice! I don’t have much time.”
She’d left an opening for me to say something like, “You practice because all you have is time.” I almost did, but I decided I wanted her to know I wasn’t going to take such an easy opening, and instead I played it straight.
“In another year, you might be able to pull off some amazing tricks.”
Mixed with odd pauses, she said, “Yeah, well… Sure!”
Maybe she didn’t care for how I ignored her gag’s setup. I stuck with it and honestly praised her effort and its results again. She smiled at me, in a good mood.
And just like that, my second visit to her in the hospital ended without any issue.
My journey home didn’t go so smoothly.
If you asked me, no better place existed on this earth than the inside of a bookstore. On my trip home, as on many such occasions, I stopped in a bookstore to enjoy the cold air conditioning and search for a good book. Luckily, I hadn’t come with a girl who would be waiting for me, so I was free to take as long as I pleased.
I had little to boast about myself, except for one ability in which I had total confidence: my concentration when I was reading a book. I could keep on reading forever, immune to my surroundings with only a few exceptions, like someone offering me a stick of gum or the school bell, which had become so familiar I could recognize its ring on a subconscious level. If I was an herbivore, I’d have been so engrossed by my fictional worlds that I wouldn’t have noticed nearby predators, and I would surely be eaten quickly.
And so, until I finished the short story I was reading, and re-emerged into the real world where a disease was taking away the girl’s life, I failed to notice the lion standing next to me.
I was so startled I nearly jumped. Wearing a large gym bag slung over her shoulder, the best friend was looking at an open paperback book in her hands. I knew, instinctively, that the entirety of her focus was on me, her prey.
I wondered if I could move quietly enough to escape. But that faint hope was quickly crushed.
“What is Sakura to you?”
She fired the question at me without even a word of greeting. Her words carried an edge sharp enough to bite through me if I answered wrong.
Cold sweat running down my back, I tried to figure out how I was supposed to answer. That was when I realized nothing prompted this interrogation except genuine concern for her friend. It was an honest question that left me no choice but to give an honest answer.
“I don’t know.”
The several seconds of silence that followed might have been her trying to decide how to respond, or she might have been working up the nerve to kill me on the spot. But the next thing I knew, her lion’s claws were on my arm, and she yanked me toward her.
As I staggered forward, she said with a menacing voice, “No matter how she might seem, she’s twice as easily hurt as other people. Stop getting close to her if you don’t mean it. If you hurt her, I’ll kill you.”
I’ll kill you. This wasn’t the common, cheap threat employed by kids in grade school and junior high. This was the best friend’s way of declaring that she was serious. I trembled.
The friend left without another word. My heart was racing, as hard as I tried to settle back down. I stood there, unable to move, until another classmate happened to wander into the bookstore and offer me gum.
That night, I tried to think seriously about what the girl meant to me.
But the answer still completely eluded me.
***
The day following my stint as prey at the bookstore, the girl sent me a text telling me to come visit her right away. This was unusual; for my past two visitations, she’d at least
given me a day’s notice. I thought something might have happened to her, but that proved not to be the case. When I arrived she gave me an unclouded smile and said, “How about you break me out of this hospital?”
What I read as urgency in her texts turned out to be excited impatience. She couldn’t wait to let me in on her latest idea for mischief.
“No way,” I said. “I don’t want to be made into a murderer.”
“It’s okay. When the guy in a love story spirits his dying sweetheart from the hospital, everyone knows she’s going to die on the trip. People will understand.”
“By that logic, someone could be straddling a tub of scalding hot water saying he sure hopes nobody comes along and pushes him in, and I could push him in and still get away with it.”
“Wouldn’t you get away with it?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “I’d be arrested for criminal injury, or worse. So if you want to escape from the hospital, find some sweetheart who doesn’t care if he shortens your life.”
She clicked her teeth and spun a hair tie on her finger as if she was actually disappointed. That surprised me. Did she really think I would go along with something that put her in real danger? Even as a joke, I wouldn’t have expected her to suggest such a foolish and life-threatening action.
Was she not joking? I looked at her face with that same familiar smile, and I felt uneasy. But the feeling quickly melted away.
She then suggested I help her escape from her room, and we went to a little store on the third floor. She walked in front of me as she towed along the rolling stand and IV bag so the tube wouldn’t pull out from her arm. Seeing her like that, she truly looked like a sick person.
We were eating ice cream bars on a couch near the shop when she said, “Hey, do you know why sakura bloom in the spring?”
I wondered what had made her choose this subject.
I said, “You bloom in the spring? I don’t even know what that means.”
“Have I ever referred to myself in the third person? Did you confuse me with another girl named Sakura you’ve been hanging out with? I didn’t know you were a cheat. Maybe you should die, too.”
“Could you stop trying to drag me along just because you think heaven will be too dull without me? Now there’s a thought—you should make sure your funeral is held on a tomobiki day.”
Tomobiki days were superstitiously believed to be conducive to spreading one’s fortune, whether good or ill, to one’s friends.
“No way!” she said. “I want my friends to keep living.”
“Maybe for your summer homework, you could write me a report on why you’d be fine with me dying. Anyway, you were asking why sakura trees bloomed in the spring. Isn’t that just the kind of flower it is?”
I thought that to be a respectable guess, but she snorted derisively. I held back the strong urge to smoosh my lemon-flavored ice cream bar all over her nose.
Sensing my displeasure, she chuckled and got to her point.
“I’ll tell you why. Did you know that after the sakura petals fall, the next buds grow within the next three months? But the buds sleep. They wait for warm weather to come, then they all bloom at once. In other words, sakura trees wait for the time they’re supposed to bloom. Isn’t that wonderful?”
I thought she was attributing too much conscious thought between the flowers’ behavior. They were simply waiting for the insects and birds to come bearing pollen, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, my thoughts went in a different direction.
I said, “Your name is a perfect fit.”
“Because I’m a beautiful flower? You’ll make me blush.”
“No, because you’re named after a flower that chooses to bloom in spring, just like you believe that our choices, not random chance, determine the people we encounter and the events in our lives.”
She looked stunned for a moment, then became very happy and said, “Thank you.”
I didn’t understand why that made her so happy. I hadn’t meant what I said as a compliment, just as an interesting fact, like how the clothes suited her when we were shopping.
She said, “Your name matches you well, too, [???]-kun.”
“I don’t know. Does it?”
“Look,” she said, laughing proudly as she pointed back and forth at herself and me. “Death is next to you. Get it?” She was referring to the characters of my name. “Death and the spring tree?”
Once again, the feeling struck me that something was off with her; that sense had permeated our entire conversation.
She was nibbling at her watermelon popsicle, and as always, she seemed as if she was going to live forever. That hadn’t changed, but there was something in her joke that reminded me of… I needed a moment to finish the thought, but then it came to me: She reminded me of a kid on the last day of summer vacation scrambling to finish a procrastinated independent study assignment.
Has something happened to her? I wondered with genuine concern. But I didn’t ask. That hint of urgency I saw in her seemed only natural. She only had a year left to live. The times she managed to remain unperturbed were the oddity.
And so, I filed away the sense of wrongness I felt that day as something insignificant, a creation of my subjective point of view.
I thought I was right.
***
But when she next asked me to visit on Saturday morning, that vague sense of wrongness manifested in visible form.
I arrived on time, and she noticed me right away and smiled and called my name. But her smile seemed slightly stiff.
Her expressive face was like a canvas on which her feelings were painted for me to see, and what I saw was nervousness. I sensed something bad was coming, and I didn’t chase that premonition away.
My legs threatened to take a step back, but I steadied them and sat in my usual folding chair, when she took a deep breath and said something that didn’t help shake my worry.
“Hey…[???]-kun?”
I hesitated, not sure where this was going. “Yeah, are you okay?”
“We only have to do one round,” she said, reaching for a deck of cards on her bedside shelf. “But will you play truth or dare with me again?”
The devil’s game.
“Why?” I asked. I sensed I could get away with refusing then and there, but I wanted to know why she suddenly proposed another round, and why she seemed so unnaturally fearful.
When she didn’t answer me right away, I filled in for her, “There’s either something you really want to ask me, or something you really want me to do, and it’s something I would refuse if you asked me normally.”
“That’s…not it,” she mumbled stiffly. “I think you might actually tell me if I asked you, but I can’t quite bring myself to ask, so I thought I’d let luck decide.”
What was making her act so out of character? I couldn’t think of any dark secret I kept that would trouble her like this.
She stared into my eyes, as if to show me the depth of her determination. Strangely enough, my resistance evaporated under her gaze; maybe because I was the boat of reeds, or maybe something in her had affected me.
I made my decision.
“Well, I owe you for letting me borrow your book. I can play one round.”
She said, “Thanks,” as if she already knew I would accept, and she began shuffling the cards. Something was definitely off with her. Normally, she occupied every silence with chatter, but today she said only what she needed to. Curiosity and worry swirled in me like someone stirring fruit yogurt.
The rules were the same as last time, but because we were only playing a single round, we each picked five cards at random and placed them in a face down pile on her bed. We were to each choose one card.
After some serious struggle over choosing her card, she elected to go with one a little below the middle. I took the topmost card. Since this was a blind draw, each card was an equally valid choice. We also weren’t taking the choice as seriously. She probably would have been mad to hear me
say this, but I didn’t care if I won or lost the game. If the match were decided by which of us was more determined to win—if that was the way the gods had created our reality to work—then she certainly would have won.
I imagined she would say life was fun because it didn’t always work out that way.
We flipped our cards simultaneously, and she grimaced.
“Ah,” she groaned, “I lost.”
She clutched her blanket in her fists and seemed to be waiting for her crushing disappointment to pass. All I could do was watch. Eventually, she noticed my gaze, flung aside her disappointment, and smiled at me.
“Can’t go back now! That’s the way it goes!” she said. “That’s what makes it fun.”
“Oh, I have to think of a question now, don’t I?”
“Go for it. I’ll answer anything. Do you want to hear about my first kiss?”
“I’m not going to waste this chance on something less absorbing than an old sponge.”
“But sponges do basically absorb things, don’t they?”
“Sure. So? Did you think everything I say has to make sense?”
She laughed; she seemed to be in a good mood and normal enough. Maybe I’d just been overthinking things. Maybe some big secret hadn’t been causing her to act strange. Her expression could change because of the slightest reasons, like alcohol or the weather. At least I hoped I’d been wrong.
Since I’d won the right to ask her a question—even if I hadn’t particularly wanted it—I thought about what I should ask her. Her hobbies wouldn’t have changed since the last time we played. I could ask another question to find out what had made her into the person she was. To be honest, one or two other questions had me more curious—like what she thought of me.
But I didn’t have the courage to ask her those. Being with her had taught me that cowardice made me the person I was. In her bravery, I saw my opposite.
I looked at her as I searched for what to ask. She watched me back as she waited. Sitting quietly on her hospital bed, she seemed a little more like she was dying than before.
I decided on a question to shake away that premonition, and I asked it immediately.
