After returning to our hotel in Jozankei and eating dinner, I headed straight back to my room and started packing up my things. We’d be flying out from New Chitose Airport early tomorrow morning, so I figured I might as well make sure I was ready to go. Not that there was much to do aside from setting aside an outfit for tomorrow and packing up the rest of my dirty clothes, which wouldn’t even take ten minutes.
“Ugh… Damn it…”
And yet, I was hardly making any progress at all. It was like I had to stop and let out a sigh of self-pity after each and every tiny action I took.
“Dude, shut up already,” said Hasumi. “You’re gonna depress me, at this rate.”
I totally deserved this noise complaint. In fact, I was surprised he’d managed to endure my insufferableness as long as he had.
“Sorry…”
“If you’re trying to get me to ask what’s wrong, it’s not gonna happen. So you’d better just come out and say it if you really wanna share.”
“No, I wasn’t fishing for sympathy, I swear.”
“Then knock it off. Next time I hear you sigh like that, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“All right, jeez…”
Great, now I’d put a damper on Hasumi’s mood too. What a horrible thing to do to him on the last night of his class trip. And after he’d already done me such a favor by agreeing to share a room with a loser like me. What a terrible friend I was; even I was fed up with myself. How had I ever become such a pathetic excuse for a human being?
Right as I was about to stash away my wallet in my bag, a pillow whizzed across the room and smacked me right in the face, hard enough that my brain practically rattled around in my skull. I lost my balance and almost fell backward onto my ass.
“Hey!” I shouted at Hasumi. “Why’d you do that?!”
“I told you there’d be hell to pay if you didn’t knock it off.”
“But I didn’t even sigh!”
“You totally did, dude. You’re just too off in your own little world to realize it. Hell, you’re even talking to yourself way more than usual.”
“What? I haven’t said a single word, though!”
This time, he grabbed the pillow from my bed and threw it at me. Unable to dodge it in time, I took another clean hit to the face.
“What was that one for?!”
“I dunno. Just for being annoying, I guess.”
“Why, you…!”
I tried to return fire, but he effortlessly caught the pillow in midair and threw it right back at me. This was enough to push me over the edge of irritation into straight-up defiance, so I cocked back my arm and chucked my next pillow as hard as I could, channeling all of my pent-up frustration from the entire day into a single pitch. And this time, I hit my target right in the dome. Now Hasumi was getting pretty ticked off as well; he didn’t even throw the pillow back at me and instead came charging at me while swinging it like a flail.
“Hey, offside!” I shouted.
“Aw, put a sock in it,” he replied.
The pillow war raged on. Feathers flew, sheets were scattered, and even our electric kettle got knocked off the counter. It seemed the battle might never end.
Until our hotel room door clicked open.
“Hey! Keep it down in here, you two!”
It was our gym teacher, glaring at us with a vein bulging from his temple. Hasumi and I immediately ceased hostilities and set our weapons down.
“You’re high schoolers, for cryin’ out loud,” he said. “Quit horsing around like a couple of little kids. I mean, look at this mess… Are you completely out of your minds? You’d better clean this up. And if you start making a racket again, I’ll make you sit on your knees out in the hallway until the sun comes up. You hear me?”
“Sorry, sir…”
“Yeah, ‘sorry’ is right. Now don’t let it happen again.”
He slammed the door behind him.
Hasumi and I both sighed at the same time, then set about cleaning up our mess. How had the room ended up in an even greater state of disarray when I’d only been trying to pack up my things? Truly a mystery for the ages.
After getting the place relatively back in order, I sat down on my bed. “Hey, Hasumi?”
“Yeah, whaddya want?” he replied.
Apparently, he was still a bit grumpy with me. He knelt down and grabbed his water bottle from the mini-fridge, then stood back up and took a swig.
“Y’know… I thought I was doing pretty damn good for myself recently,” I said. “Finally figured out how to socialize and have a good time with other people without stressing myself out over every little thing… Or at least it felt like I had, compared to back when I had basically zero friends whatsoever.”
Hasumi twisted the cap back onto his water bottle and sat on his bed.
“But I had it all wrong. I didn’t actually ‘grow’ or unlearn any of my old shortcomings—it was just that I had a good group of friends who’d always go out of their way to make sure I felt comfortable. It’s like I’m finally seeing how everyone else around me is way more mature than I ever realized, while I’m stuck here being the same socially awkward, sniveling little brat I’ve always been.”
I could hear the self-deprecation in my own voice. Actually putting all this stuff into words made me feel like a real piece of work—a complete and utter laughingstock.
“And because I didn’t realize that any sooner, I’ve hurt somebody I really care about. It’s like, god…what do I have to do to just grow the hell up, y’know?”
“Not my problem, dude,” said Hasumi. This was a curt reply even by his standards; he really was pissed off. “Maybe you should stop feeling so sorry for yourself all the time, for one thing. It’s like you’re too drunk on your own misery to get off your ass and actually try to do something about it.”
“Wha—?!”
This hit me like a bag of bricks. Of all the people who might have called me out on such a thing, Hasumi was the last person I would have expected—which was probably what made it sting that much harder.
“Look, I’m sorry I pissed you off,” I said. “But you didn’t have to go that far, jeez… You really hurt my feelings, man.”
“Sorry. Won’t happen again.”
“Don’t say it in the first place if you’re just gonna apologize right away…”
“No, that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
I cocked my head. “Uh, what?”
“When you hurt someone, you say you’re sorry. When your friends go out of their way to do something for you or make sure you feel comfortable, you just say thanks. It’s really not that hard, dude. You’re the one who’s making these issues way more difficult and convoluted than they need to be. Stop acting like some high-IQ, glasses-pushing bookworm character who can’t comprehend basic human emotions, and just be normal.”
This was surprisingly sound advice. And here I’d thought he was just going to shrug me off; I felt kind of touched by his thoughtfulness. However…
“Okay, fair. But why are you being so weirdly harsh about this?”
“Because you got us in trouble with the teacher.”
“You’re the one who threw the first pillow, man.”
“Yeah, because you wouldn’t stop with the whole ‘poor me’ act.”
“Trust me, if you knew what I’ve been through today, you’d—actually, y’know what? Never mind. This is a waste of our time. Let’s just drop it already.”
I didn’t need us getting heated about this again. If I ruined my friendship with Hasumi here too, then this would officially be the worst class trip in the history of forever. I rolled over on my bed and stared up at the ceiling.
“So what do you do in a situation where a simple sorry won’t cut it?” I asked.
“Keep apologizing until they forgive you, duh,” said Hasumi.
“And if that doesn’t work?”
There was a long pause before his next answer. “Try to talk things out as much as possible, I guess. If nothing else, maybe you can at least learn why they don’t wanna forgive you and go from there.” Hasumi let out a great big yawn. “All right. I’m gonna go brush my teeth and hit the hay.”
And with that, he headed off into the bathroom.
“Try to talk things out as much as possible.”
Have a heart-to-heart, in other words. Maybe he was right and that was the only way to solve this. There was no trick or cheat code to easily salvage a broken relationship—you had to do it the old-fashioned way. But assuming Ushio and I did sit down and talk things over, what would be my ideal outcome of that conversation?
What kind of relationship did I really want us to have with each other?
What was Ushio to me? And what did I want to be to her?