“I’m fine with this.”
Ryuuji made up his mind once and for all as he took the pencil and smoothly wrote words in the blank space. His hope was to take the “science course.” After graduation he “wanted to work.”
The issue was just that he hadn’t gotten consent from his mother—but that was probably fine at this point.
He had tried his best to make Yasuko see the truth, and even tried talking to her about it more than once. If she didn’t get it even after that, he wasn’t going to be so gung-ho about getting parental permission. He would decide things for himself and work toward everything himself. That was all he could do. He believed there wasn’t any other way.
If someone said that wasn’t what he “wanted,” then what did he want? He didn’t even have a place to go or a direction he was heading in, so where was he supposed to set sail to fulfill his desires?
Nothing would come of it. This was all he could do.
“Yasuko…my mom refuses to acknowledge that I have to give up on going to college because of our financial problems, and I think that’s what’s holding her back. She’s been trying as hard as she can to be a good parent for me until now, and she’s done everything possible to keep me from being worried. I don’t want her to have to tough it out anymore. That’s what I hope for.”
2-C, Takasu Ryuuji. He signed the printout and pushed it towards the teacher. The teacher’s lips, which were lined with a beige-ish shade of pink, moved faintly as though she wanted to say something, but instead she replied, “I see… Then I’ll take this.”
She put the printout into a binder. Taiga watched that with bright eyes.
“Then do something about the window, have Aisaka-san write something, and then you can go home. If you can, please bring the printout to the staff room.”
Koigakubo Yuri left the interview room with those parting words. Ryuuji sighed. He felt incredibly tired, but he still needed to do physical labor. He certainly was at fault though, so he had nothing to complain about.
“Ah well, I’ll work on this stuff, so you just hurry up and finish writing something up.”
“I’ll help with that, too.”
“If you help, it’ll take way longer, you klutz. If you want to hurry and get home, write that up.”
Hmph, Taiga reclined in her chair.
“Who cares about the future? It’s stupid… What’s going to happen if I write something on this paper? I can’t believe you’re being such a goody-two-shoes about this. You’re going to work? Like really? You haven’t even had a part-time job before.”
“That’s what I came up with after seriously thinking about it. I just never had a part-time job because Yasuko would have stopped me… You’ve gotta think about this stuff, too. You’ve got to think about yourself seriously every once in a while.”
He decided to place the thin inner metal plank in first. Luckily, the board itself hadn’t folded over or warped at all, so all he had to do was watch his fingers and stick it back in. Ryuuji picked up the somewhat hefty plank and swallowed his breath. “Oof,” he supported the plank with his knees and stuck it back into the middle of the sill.
Taiga was silent for a while as she watched him, but then slowly pulled the printout over to herself and crouched over it. He thought she had finally gotten in the mood to write something down.
“Tah-dah!”
“What do you think you’re doing?! Hey, wait a sec! Stop that! Why you!”
Taiga had a simple, folded paper airplane pinched in her right hand. Before Ryuuji could even stop her, Taiga stood from her chair and opened the window.
“Fly with the wind!”
“Ah!”
She aimed the airplane out into the midwinter air and threw it out past the dripping praying mantis. The plane drifted on the wind better than expected and eventually did a somersault in the dark skies before falling straight to the ground.
“You…idiot! How could you do something like that?! We’re going to get it! Are you serious?!”
“It’s fine, I don’t need that thing. Just leave it.”
Taiga was still looking out the window as though it had become someone else’s problem. She wasn’t looking for the now out of sight paper airplane. She snorted haughtily, so that Ryuuji could see the white puff of her breath.
“I don’t need that thing. Who cares about the future? Who cares about having interests? Nobody knows what’ll happen with that stuff. No one can see what’s going to happen in the future—not even me. I don’t want anyone telling me what to do like they know. What am I supposed to write? What am I supposed to hope for? Even if I have aspirations, they won’t come true anyway. Even if I do everything I can, I fell off a cliff, and all I did was cause problems, didn’t I? I realized that while I was licking my own wounds.”
At the intensity of the words she spat out, Ryuuji didn’t know how to reply. But the things he had been thinking and Taiga’s words had suddenly synchronized.
“Thinking about it is useless…but I know you’re going to tell me ‘Don’t say that’ anyway.”
“I’m not.”
Taiga turned around at Ryuuji’s words.
“I’m thinking…the same thing as you,” he said.
Taiga watched Ryuuji nod as he spoke. Her large eyes grew even wider. I don’t want to say this, but, he prefaced his words before he continued, “We’re weird, aren’t we? I’m poor, and you’re rich. We’re in completely opposite situations, but I guess the end result is the same.”
“Why… But didn’t you want to go work?”
“If someone asked me whether I actually wanted to work, well, I can’t say yes. I think Miss Single is telling me all this stuff because she knows. This is just how reality is. Because of how reality is and because doing anything else wouldn’t result in anything, I just thought it’d be better if I chose to work. I thought that had to be the ‘right answer.’ That’s what I ‘want.’”
When he tried saying it out loud, he backtracked, That’s pretty irresponsible. He understood why his teacher had reason to worry.
He was sure that once he failed, he would just end up saying, “But that was all I could do right then!” He was doing it for Yasuko’s sake, so he was right.
He knew he was planning out an escape route before he even progressed forward. He really was doing this for Yasuko, but he also knew that he was just justifying his choice. He was trying to put himself in a safe zone. He was escaping into the protection of overwhelming righteousness. He wanted the world to think, “Takasu Ryuuji made the right choice.” “He’s a good kid.”
In actuality, he knew. Ryuuji just didn’t have the courage to look into the hollow cavity that was a gaping, terrifying maw inside of him. He knew he didn’t have the courage to face the powerlessness he felt from not having a place to go.
He wasn’t tough enough to watch and believe in the trajectory of the ball he had thrown with his own hands. He also wasn’t brave enough to just send his future flying right into the midwinter sky. That was all this was.
“Don’t you think I’m pitiful? Why don’t you criticize me for it the way you normally do?”
“You…”
However, Taiga didn’t insult him. She didn’t yell You dog! or You pig! at him or call him an insect or a pile of dung or a lecher. Her mouth twisted, and she dropped her eyes to her own toes. Her voice got low.
“If you’re calling yourself pitiful then…what am I supposed to be?”
The Palmtop Tiger, who supposedly knew no fear, put her head down.
“At least you’re looking toward what’s ahead. It feels like you’re thinking about what you can do, like you’re making the best of it. I…I can only see what’s in front of me right now.”
Taiga’s gaze might have been following the curve the paper plane had traced. The winter sky started to become even darker, and the far-off streets blackened until they looked like waves piling on each other at the edge of the ocean.
“I’ve just been in denial about who I am for so, soo, soooooo long. I’ve been thinking about why I ended up like this and what I could have done to avoid turning out this way.”
That’s all I can do, Taiga continued to murmur as she stood up.
“For example, if my parents were just normal parents…if I could have had a normal life and if the three of us lived in my condo together as a family, I wonder what would have happened? What do you think?”
She turned her back to Ryuuji, pushing her face against the windowpane.
“If I’d lived next to you in a normal three-person family, and we met like normal people do when we were put in the same class in April, I wonder what would have happened to us?”