Why was he crying? I wondered. It seemed reasonable to assume it had something to do with the outfit he was wearing—though I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to why he was dressed like a girl at the moment. Had he always been into cross-dressing or something, and simply did a good job of hiding it? Maybe that was the case. But now that I’d seen him like this, I couldn’t very well pretend I hadn’t. I had to say something.
“U-Ushio…? Is that you?” I asked tentatively. “Wh-why are you dressed like that?”
His eyes shot wide open so fast, I thought they might pop out of their sockets. His mouth flapped open and closed, but no words came out. I’d never seen him so flustered and disconcerted before.
He tried to stammer out an excuse. “S-Sakuma, no, I—I can explain, I just—”
The crack in his usually calm, husky voice made it painfully obvious just how distraught he was. He was struggling to even string a series of words together, and before long all that came out of his gaping mouth were labored breaths. With every attempt to offer an explanation, the intervals between each breath grew shorter, and soon he was literally gasping for air, face contorting in agony as he clutched at his chest.
Oh god… He’s hyperventilating!
“Ushio! A-are you okay?!” I cried.
Not a moment later, he pitched forward—and then he puked. I could only watch, stunned, as he loudly spilled his guts out onto the park pavement, forming a large puddle of fluids and half-digested food. Even after his body had wrung every last drop of bile from his stomach, he continued dry heaving for quite a while. When the purging eventually stopped, I could see a long, shiny trail of saliva extending from his mouth to the ground, illuminated by the nearby streetlamp.
Despite having witnessed it, I couldn’t believe my eyes: my childhood best friend, one of the coolest, smartest, and most attractive guys in class, had just puked his guts out in front of me while wearing a girl’s uniform. Even after the vomiting stopped, I couldn’t bring myself to say a word—mainly because I had no earthly idea what the right thing to say in this situation might be. Ushio, meanwhile, just kept limply hanging his head for a while, as though his soul had just exited his body. Then, after a long and awkward silence, he rose unsteadily to his feet and took off like a bullet from a gun. As he passed by me, I caught a quick glimpse of his face. He was crying yet again.
And so I was left there, alone in the empty park, with only the clear and resonant singing of the nightly insects to keep me company. I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, I’d just inadvertently made a huge mistake—one I could never take back.
✦ ✦ ✦
As soon as I made it back home, I went and lay down flat on my bed. It still didn’t feel real—it felt so unreal, in fact, that I had to wonder if perhaps I was just having a weird dream. Every time I thought back on what had happened in that park tonight, I got this strange aftertaste in my mouth—something akin to guilt. As if I’d seen something I was not supposed to see. I knew it wasn’t really my fault for having randomly been in the same place at the same time, but it still felt weirdly like my responsibility regardless. Like if I hadn’t set foot in that park that day, Ushio wouldn’t have started hyperventilating, and he wouldn’t have had to puke his guts out.
I pulled out my cell phone, opened the address book, and scrolled down to the entry for Ushio Tsukinoki. Come to think of it, he was the very first contact I’d ever added back in our first year of high school. He’d just walked up to me while I was fiddling with my cell phone one day and offered to exchange numbers.
If I really wanted to, I could text him right now and ask what was going on, or offer to lend him an ear if he needed one. But I didn’t know if drawing attention to it was the right thing to do in the first place. Something told me Ushio hadn’t wanted to be seen like that, in women’s clothing. In which case, it might very well be best to just forget what I’d witnessed tonight and never bring it up again.
“…Yeah, maybe that’s for the best,” I mumbled to my ceiling.
I was suddenly reminded of something I’d read in a book a long time ago: “If lightning strikes on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, and no one’s around for miles and miles, does the thunder even make a sound?” The answer, the book posited, was no—because no one heard it, so that sound may as well have never happened.
If there existed no trace of a given event—whether in recorded media or living memory—then it really was possible to pretend as if something never happened. It was the same line of logic behind claims like “it’s not cheating if you don’t get caught.” There was no doubt in my mind that Ushio probably wished our little encounter tonight had not occurred, so the best thing I could do for him right now was to wipe it completely from my memory and hope he could do the same. Then, neither of us would have to acknowledge the cross-dressing or the puking ever again.
So, I decided then and there that when I saw him at school on Monday, I would play it off like everything was totally normal. I wouldn’t treat him any differently whatsoever. He’d go back to being one of the most popular guys in class, and I’d resume my role as a social outcast. That was clearly the best play here—for him and me both.
My mind was made up.
Unfortunately, Ushio didn’t end up coming to school on Monday. The teacher told us he’d called in sick with the flu. And although a few of my classmates did express concern for him (or, alternatively, crack jokes about him being a wimp), no one was talking about it anymore by the time second period rolled around. This led me to believe that I was the only one in class who knew anything about (what I presumed to be) the real reason for his absence. I couldn’t say I blamed him for needing a day off to recover from an embarrassing moment like that. I prayed that was all this was, and that he’d come waltzing through the classroom door tomorrow like nothing had ever happened.
But Ushio didn’t come to school the next day either.
Or the day after that.
Or even the day after that…
As the days went on, more and more of my classmates expressed genuine concern for Ushio—especially those who were in his close circle. Each morning, as soon as they found out he was absent yet again, they’d start flashing each other concerned looks, wondering aloud what had happened to him, if perhaps he’d come down with something far worse than the flu, noting how he hadn’t been coming to track practice either. During one of these group conversations, I overheard that no one had even been able to get in touch with Ushio, not even among his closest friends. Apparently, they’d gone to try and visit him at his house on at least one occasion, but they were turned away. I couldn’t blame them for being apprehensive—even I was at a loss as to what to do now.
Should I send him a message? Call him? Go stop by his house?
I was worried about him, obviously. When I imagined the possibility of him simply dropping out of school and never showing his face here again, my stomach sank. I started kicking myself for ever stepping out the door to go for a walk that night.
But the days came and went, and still I had no clue what to do about it.
Until eventually, near the tail end of June, after Ushio had been absent more than ten days, Ms. Iyo opened our morning homeroom period by announcing that there was “something very important” we needed to talk about.