TWENTY-FOUR HOURS PASSED BEFORE Ureshino touched on the subject of how he’d been hurt.
He usually came over in the afternoon, but today he arrived in the morning, bento lunch in hand.
Rion, too, was there, though he was also rarely at the castle in the morning, and when asked about it he answered that he had a ‘temporary holiday’. He didn’t elaborate, but maybe, thought Kokoro, he’d come early as he was worried about Ureshino.
Around eleven o’clock, Ureshino already had his lunch spread out before him and was chomping away. The inside of his mouth seemed to hurt, and he muttered an ‘Ouch!’ and grimaced, though his appetite seemed as healthy as ever.
‘How come you’ve got the bento?’ Masamune asked.
‘I told Mum I was going to School and she made it for me. But I didn’t want to go today so I skipped it.’ Ureshino kept on chewing.
Kokoro was taken aback a bit by the mention of School, and Subaru, looking doubtful, asked ‘School? Why use the English word?’
‘He means the Free School,’ Masamune said.
Kokoro had become more used to Subaru’s dyed brown hair, and though he and Masamune were back to playing video games together, things were still a bit awkward between them. The roots of Subaru’s hair were growing out black again; this only added to the feeling that things weren’t quite right, and Kokoro tended to avert her eyes.
‘Isn’t there one near where you live, too? For kids who’ve dropped out of school?’
‘Yes, there’s one near us.’ Kokoro’s heart pounded as the conversation turned to her.
Masamune shot them a know-it-all look. ‘It’s the type of place parents first turn to when their kids stop going to school and they’re confused about what to do. There’s one of those private support groups near the school I went to. But when I stopped going to junior high, my parents didn’t really do anything. They just said, Masamune probably wouldn’t want to go there, and that was it.’
‘I see,’ Aki said, sounding impressed. ‘We don’t have one near us. I’ve never heard of them.’
‘Hmm,’ Fuka murmured. ‘I wonder if there’s one near our school. I’ve never been aware of one.’
‘Didn’t your parents ever try to get you to go to one?’ Masamune asked.
‘My mother’s – sort of busy,’ Fuka said, lowering her eyes for some reason.
Kokoro couldn’t bring up her own experience. She remembered the School was called Kokoro no kyoshitsu – Classroom for the Heart – with her own name in the title, and so she clammed up. It was just a coincidence that they shared a name, but she knew that if someone pointed it out, she’d die of embarrassment.
But she was impressed by Masamune – how he called it a Free School, and used the term private support group. She’d never given it any thought.
Masamune looked at Ureshino. ‘So you’re missing School. Have you been going there all this time?’
‘Yeah, but just in the mornings,’ Ureshino said, gulping down a mouthful of food. He looked up, hesitated a beat, and said, ‘No one’s asked me anything so far, so I’ll tell you.’
He made it sound like a small thing.
‘Boys in my class did this to me. It wasn’t like I was being bullied or anything.’
There was an audible gasp. He seemed not to notice.
‘Whenever anyone gets beaten up, people instantly say it’s bullying, and I don’t like it.’
‘Why were you beaten up, then?’ Rion asked.
Ureshino responded without looking up.
‘It was guys I made friends with in junior high. We got on fine – they’d come to my house to play video games, we’d go to juku together. I thought we were friends, but then things got a little weird.’
He said it casually, but the hard edge in his voice made it clear that Ureshino was far from calm about it. If it’s painful to discuss, Kokoro thought, he doesn’t need to talk about it. But Ureshino seemed to want to get it out.
She had no idea what kind of people these classmates were, but if she thought about her own classmates, she had a vague idea. She’d known boys like that since elementary school, who’d talk about you behind your back, tease you, and sometimes go too far.
But as Ureshino said, Kokoro had never thought of that as bullying.
Ureshino might feel the same way. Things got a little weird, he’d said, but he might not consider that a case of bullying either.
‘When they’d come to my house, I’d give them drinks and ice cream and stuff, and I felt sorry for them since they didn’t get any spending money from their parents, so when we went out, I paid for their food. And after a while they just started expecting it, for me to always pay, but the more I did it the more they respected me, the more they tried to please me. It wasn’t as if they were making me do it, was it? But the teacher at our juku found out and told my parents, and my father blew his top.’
Ureshino related all this matter-of-factly, and paused here for the first time. ‘Aren’t you ashamed, trying to buy friends like that? my father asked me.’ The hurt showed in Ureshino’s eyes.
He clutched the chopsticks into a fist. It seemed like he couldn’t hold them properly.
‘My mum got angry with my dad. Why be angry with him, she demanded, when it’s the other boys who are to blame for making him buy them drinks and suchlike? I felt the same way, but I hated to see them fight. I was sick of it, and when they talked about it with the other parents it seems they got shouted at, and then things got super awkward and it was too stressful to go to school.’
‘Yeah, must have been.’ A clear, bell-like voice spoke up. It was Fuka. She asked him to carry on. ‘Then what?’
‘And so Mother took me to the Free School and I enrolled. She took time off in the mornings. Honestly, it was so annoying. As though she was spying on me. It wasn’t as if I was going to die or anything.’
‘Die?’
It was Subaru who looked doubtful. Ureshino gave a small laugh.
‘What a joke, eh? According to my parents I was being bullied, and kids who are bullied blame themselves and often consider suicide. They read books on the subject and were really worried about me. It’s so stupid, because I never thought I wanted to die. They’d cry and say, Haruka-chan, you’ll be OK.’
‘Haruka?’ Masamune exclaimed at the revelation of Ureshino’s first name, usually a girl’s name. The half of Ureshino’s face that wasn’t covered in gauze flinched, as though he instantly regretted it.
‘Who the hell is Haruka?’ Masamune said.
‘That’s me.’ Ureshino looked up. ‘And so what?’ he said cuttingly. ‘So my name’s Haruka. Just forget it.’
‘What a sweet name. Like a girl,’ Aki said. She didn’t seem to have any ulterior motive for saying this, but Ureshino’s face turned beetroot.
‘Anyway, it doesn’t suit me at all,’ he said.
That must explain it, Kokoro thought.
When they had introduced themselves, everyone gave their first names, except for Ureshino, who only told them his last name. He seemed not to want to reveal it. He must have been mercilessly teased about it for years.
‘So anyway, my parents were a real pain about it, my father saying I was pathetic for not going to school just because of that. The teachers at the School tried to convince them to give me a bit more time to sort things out, but Father said they had been too soft on me, so I’d have to go back to normal school in the second semester.’
‘What about your mum? Didn’t she stand up for you?’
It was only when Fuka spoke that Ureshino looked up. But then he quickly hung his head again.
‘She did, but in the end, she did what my father told her.’
‘Oh.’
‘But it wasn’t what I expected. I heard our homeroom teacher say the boys were worried I’d stopped going to school because of them, but then when I came back, they weren’t a bit sorry about what had happened. Which stressed me, so I tried to talk to them about it. My father must have said all kinds of things to their parents, I said, and I was sorry.’
‘I don’t think you needed to apologize for anything,’ Masamune said bluntly. He sounded a little angry himself. Ureshino didn’t respond.
He might say he and his classmates were still on good terms, but he’d had to apologize, and though he said they didn’t actually do anything to him, he was still expecting them to show some remorse. Ureshino’s story was riddled with contradictions, as if perfectly expressing his own confusion.
But he wasn’t lying.
The emotions he felt at each moment were, no doubt, just as he described.
‘One of the guys said to me, Hey, if you’re not going to treat us any more when we go out, then I don’t want to hang around with you. The other guys smirked and laughed. And so I lost my temper and hit him, and they punched me back. And that’s how I got hurt.’
The group said nothing, and Ureshino went on with his story.
‘I was the one who threw the first punch, according to them. Things have really escalated now. My parents are talking about suing them or something, and I have no idea how it’s going to play out. Teachers at the School are worried about me, too. They’re the only ones, you know, who’ve said anything to me, like, Ureshino-kun, what do you want to do now?
‘So.’ Ureshino’s voice became a little wobbly. He suddenly turned to face Masamune. ‘Don’t get all high and mighty, and ridicule private support groups as though you’re above it. The teachers there – they’re the ones who really listened to me.’
Masamune glanced awkwardly away. Fuka spoke up.
‘What did you say to them?’ she asked.
‘When?’
‘When they asked you what you want to do, what did you say?’
‘I said I didn’t want to do anything,’ Ureshino said. ‘I told them I wanted to stay at home by myself. I didn’t even want my mother to be there. I’m OK with going to the School sometimes, I said, but mainly I just want to chill out at home. And with my injuries, they let me do that.’
‘But you did want to come to the castle?’ said Fuka.
‘Is that wrong?’ he asked.
‘No – it isn’t,’ Masamune answered in Fuka’s place.
Everyone turned to look at him.
‘You had it tough, didn’t you,’ he said curtly, an unusually serious look on his face.
After they’d heard Ureshino’s story, it was nearly time for the castle to close for the day. They stood in front of their mirrors in the grand foyer and said goodbye.
‘Well, see you tomorrow,’ Aki said.
‘Yeah, bye now,’ they said to each other. As if it were the natural thing to do.