Tuesday
Day
I THINK I’VE ALREADY alluded to this well enough, but it’s a fundamental truth—whether you’re human or monster, whether you’re good or bad, whether it’s noon or night, no one really likes to see bad things happen to others. Thus, I was fully aware that life at school, starting today, was going to become really unpleasant. I would have to sit and watch a certain classmate face even more loathsome treatment than she ever had before. And I would have to do it without letting anyone see how uncomfortable I was with the whole thing.
Realizing this, I steeled myself, but naturally all the resolve I thought I had mustered to make it through the day was blown away by reality—a reality that was leagues worse than anything I could have possibly imagined.
When I arrived at the classroom in the morning, things were immediately different from usual. For one, Motoda was already there, which probably wasn’t that strange; his coach might have had something come up, which would mean no morning practice. What concerned me the most was seeing the girls surrounding a particular desk—Nakagawa’s. When I glanced over, half out of politeness’s sake, wondering whether something had happened, I saw that Nakagawa was in her seat, crying.
At first, I assumed that she had just broken up with her boyfriend or something. She had a pretty face and a nice body, so she was popular with the boys in our class. And plenty of people worried about getting cheated on. Her tear-soaked face made her seem like a completely different girl from the other day when she had looked at Iguchi like she was a cockroach.
It was when Yano arrived at school that I realized the issue wasn’t something merely as simple as that.
She entered the classroom as she did every day, greeting the room with a “Good…morning.” Despite yesterday’s strange occurrence, as per her custom, she then headed to her seat, no one so much as reacting to her.
Yano was her usual self. What was different was everyone else.
Nakagawa’s desk was in the front of the classroom. As Yano started to pass beside them, Motoda, who was also there, smacked her in the back of the head with an empty plastic bottle.
“Hey,” he said.
It was a far softer sound than that of yesterday’s slap, but it was enough for everyone in the room to freeze in their tracks and look at the pair.
Yano turned to look at him, stunned at both his voice and the unprompted attack. Everyone knew that Motoda had previously done numerous things to Yano, but no one, including him, had ever laid hands on her directly.
Even without knowing the dynamics of our class, it was obvious at a glance which one of them could overpower the other from their difference in size alone.
As the tension in the room rose, everyone wondering what exactly was going to happen, it was Motoda who was the first to speak again.
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
I had no idea what he was referring to. Yano cocked her head as though she didn’t either.
“I was…what?”
That bizarre speech pattern of Yano’s only ever made people angrier.
“You tore up Nakagawa’s shoes and threw them out in the yard, didn’t you? As payback for yesterday.”
Did that really happen? I wondered. From my seat, I glanced at Nakagawa’s feet, which is when I finally noticed the brown slippers she was wearing.
“Don’t play games with me,” Motoda said.
What lingered inside of Motoda, the root of the forceful edge with which he spoke, was not a sense of justice, nor righteous fury on Nakagawa’s behalf. It wasn’t even disdain—instead, it a pure and simple desire. The desire to harm Yano. I think we all realized it, but such matters were of no consequence to the members of our class.
If I had advice for Yano, then I wish I could have given it to her before. I probably should have done so the previous night. I could have told her the correct facial expression to make when someone says something like that to you. If she had just shaken her head from side to side, given a meek denial with a tense look upon her face, she would have been fine. If she did that, then unless the other person had proof of the accusation, which usually was not the case, then they would calm immediately down.
So why would she make that face?
“I don’t know…anything about that,” she said with a grin, flat-out denying the accusation.
“Come again?”
“III…dooon’t knooow…aaanyyything…about that,” she said again, stretching out each and every word as though he hadn’t heard her, before turning and heading toward her seat, that self-satisfied smirk still on her face.
Perhaps she believed that sharing a smile with the world was a surefire technique to make friends with other people. Perhaps in her twisted mind, so long as she always smiled, always laughed, then others would be endeared to her.
If so, then I needed to teach her: no, that’s wrong. If you smile at someone who doesn’t want to see your smile, then you’re only going to rub them the wrong way.
It was because she made that face.
“Wipe that smile off your face,” snarled Motoda, taking a rectangular blackboard eraser that was sitting on the ledge of the blackboard in hand. “You creepy little—!”
He called her a truly foul name.
And without a moment’s hesitation, he flung the eraser at her. Luckily, the side that struck the back of her head was the softer one. As it fell to the floor, the people near her jumped back, as though a dead bug had just come flying their way. It was an object that had come in contact with Yano, after all.
“Wah!” said Yano, pressing her hand to her skull. But as she took her seat, the grin still remained on her face.
Seeing that look, I grew frightened again. How could she smile even at a time like this? Was this just some stubbornness or something on her part?
There were no other overtures made towards Yano that morning. Until the teacher arrived, the whole class was occupied with the matter of the still-crying Nakagawa’s shoes, but ultimately, the culprit was never found, and Nakagawa spent the whole day wearing visitor’s slippers.
It was our teacher who picked up the eraser, admonishing us, “Who did this? Put things back where they belong.”
As I watched, I wondered who could possibly manage to pick it up, when it was too awful for any of us to even say who it had struck.