She shoveled another spoonful of ice cream into her mouth, and the spiraling mountain of soft serve began to cave in. Her dessert was clearly a lot more food than the Swiss rolls that Ushio and I had ordered, yet at this rate, she’d probably finish before us.
“You sure do love to eat, don’t you, Natsuki?” Ushio said, sounding amused.
“Yep!” Hoshihara nodded triumphantly. “But I mean, so does everyone, right? I’m a firm believer that you should never be ashamed of your own appetite.”
“Wow. You could almost put that on a motivational poster.”
“I wasn’t always like that, to be fair. Only for the past few years or so…” Hoshihara’s spoon paused in the air as she reminisced. “See, back when I first started junior high, I didn’t know many of the kids in my class. But everyone else already seemed to have their own little social circles of kids they’d been friends with since elementary school. So it was pretty hard for me to find a friend group I could latch on to.”
This was a relatively common predicament. Since junior highs usually pulled their student bodies from several different elementary schools, there could be some major disparities in terms of what percentage came from where depending on the school district. And when you then divided them up even further by class, you were bound to end up with some kids who felt like fish out of water, as Hoshihara evidently had.
“I’d always eat by myself during lunch hour,” she went on. “But then one day, the cutest girl in our class came up to my desk and said, ‘Wow, you sure can eat a lot, Hoshihara-san! I wish I could do that!’ Then a bunch of other kids came over and started saying the same thing. And they weren’t making fun of me for it or anything. Everyone seemed to find it genuinely amusing and endearing, which made me feel pretty good about myself. And that’s when I sort of had an epiphany…”
She finished off the last of the ice cream portion of her parfait and licked her lips.
“I was like, ‘Huh… I guess when I eat a lot, it makes other people happy.’”
Ushio and I didn’t say a word. We just listened in silence.
“From that day on, I gained a reputation for being the ‘big eater’ in our class, and for a while I sort of made that my whole identity because that’s what everyone seemed to like about me. But really, it was just an easy bit I could do to make friends with people. And over time, I only got better and better at eating more and more, until eventually I became the girl with the black-hole stomach sitting before you today! Kinda funny how little things like that can have such a huge impact on who we grow up to be, huh?”
It sounded like Hoshihara didn’t think of this story as anything more than a mildly amusing anecdote, but I didn’t see it that way at all. I felt kind of unsettled, actually.
“Do you still feel that’s your whole identity now?” Ushio asked cautiously, suggesting she was trying to navigate the subject as tactfully as possible.
“What, you mean being the big eater in class? Mmm… I’d like to think I’ve rounded out my personality a little bit since then, but who knows? Maybe some of the other kids still see me that way. Hard to say!”
“Sorry, I guess what I really mean is…do you still feel like you’re only eating that much to make other people happy?”
Ushio’s face had gone slightly pale with apprehension—and I could only imagine mine looked much the same. She was probably feeling just as guilty right now as I was. Hoshihara glanced back and forth between the two of us a couple of times like a deer in headlights, then picked up on the nervous tension in the air.
“Oh, no, don’t get me wrong!” she said, waving both hands frantically in front of her face. “I’m not, like, forcing myself to eat for other people’s amusement or anything! That’s just an unintended side effect, or, like…a neat perk, I guess? There was a period of time when I had to really push myself to keep stuffing my face all the time… But that’s ancient history! Now I only eat so much because I genuinely like to! Promise!”
“W-well, all right…” said Ushio, shrinking back a bit at this emphatic response. “As long as you’re not feeling pressured into doing something you hate. That’s the last thing I’d ever want to do to another person, let alone a friend.”
Ushio scooped up a bit of whipped cream with the side of her fork and brought it carefully up to her mouth.
“For me, I remember always feeling like I was just performing the role of some character that everyone else wanted me to be,” she said. “And that person was so far removed from my own mental image of who I was that it felt like I was constantly suffocating myself for the sake of others… But it sounds like in your case, Natsuki, you’ve managed to incorporate what other people want and expect from you into your identity in a way that makes you happy. I wonder what the difference is there.”
Ushio’s expression carried a hint of gloominess, but I could tell she wasn’t just being down on herself here—she was genuinely curious.
Hoshihara hummed, mulling this over for a good while. “I feel like it’s just a matter of whether you actually like the thing or not, y’know? Like, I always had a pretty big appetite even before that, so it’s not like the person I thought everyone else wanted me to be was all that different from who I thought I was to begin with, unlike you.”
“But that’s the thing, though,” said Ushio. “I didn’t hate the idea of being that person either at first. Up until I started junior high, I really did feel like I wanted to be more like your stereotypical boy… I don’t feel that way anymore, obviously, but I did.”
“Yeah, on second thought, it’s probably just a fundamental difference in the nature of your situation and mine, actually. I could always stop eating so much if I really didn’t enjoy it, but for you it’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s kind of like if I learned to enjoy eating green peppers because I knew everyone else hated them and liked it when I took them off their hands. But for you, it doesn’t even matter whether you like them or not—you’re allergic. And if you eat too many, your throat will swell up and you’ll choke to death or something. You can’t just ‘learn’ to be okay with it.”
“Interesting analogy… Not sure it’s entirely apt, but it definitely sounded convincing.”
Ushio and Hoshihara both seemed fully invested in getting to the bottom of this conundrum. Come to think of it, I remembered having a similar conversation with Ushio once—though I honestly found it just as difficult to relate to now as I had back then.
“Gotta admit, this is getting a little too high-level for me…” I said.
“You’ve never had any struggles like that, Kamiki-kun?” asked Hoshihara.
“Nope, not at all. It’s enough to make me kinda jealous, actually. I feel so left out.”
“Interesting… Guess that means you must have a much more solid grasp deep down on who you are and who you wanna be.”
“I assure you I don’t.”
This wasn’t mere modesty or self-deprecation, mind you—it was simply that perhaps the only thing I did know for certain about my own convictions was that they were nebulous at best. I had a terminal case of indecisiveness.
Hoshihara awkwardly laughed this comment off, then resumed eating her parfait. Ushio got back to work on her Swiss roll too. I breathed a little sigh of relief internally; for a second there, I’d been afraid that conversation might take a very different turn.