Did you see her face? I scolded myself. Did you see her tears? That was her hurt pouring out.
My teeth ached, and I realized I’d been grinding them. I never thought the day would come when I inflicted physical pain on myself because of a relationship. I was going crazy. But I wasn’t so deluded as to consider this pain a penance. Pain wouldn’t absolve me of my crime.
Her prank was what made me angry; her joke had rubbed me the wrong way. That was the truth, but even so, that didn’t excuse the use of violence against her. It didn’t matter if she hurt me, whether or not she intended to.
Did she hurt me? I asked myself. How? What got hurt?
I recalled her smell and her heartbeat, but I didn’t know what those memories meant. All I knew was her insult was something I couldn’t let go. Acting out of irrational emotion, I had hurt her.
I walked the street lined with large detached homes. It was a weekday afternoon, and no one else was around.
If I was to suddenly disappear, no one would notice.
The quiet and the stillness of the street made the calm male voice calling my name from behind all the more startling.
“[Uninteresting Classmate]-kun.”
I turned around to see a classmate holding an umbrella. Until he spoke to me, I hadn’t noticed his presence at all. Two things puzzled me: One, that he talked to me; two, he had an intense expression, instead of the agreeable smile I thought of him as always wearing. He looked almost angry.
This was the second time we’d spoken in the same day. That rarely happened with anyone.
He was our class representative, and he always came off as cool-headed and genuine. Normally, he had no reason to interact with me, and I was curious why he did so now. I was still shaken from before, but I composed myself and said, “Hey.”
He just stared at me in silence. Seeing nothing to do but try again, I said, “So you live around here, huh?”
After a moment, he said, “No, I don’t.”
He was definitely in a bad mood. Maybe he hated the rain, too. The rain always meant the annoyance of having to carry more things around. Although right now he just had on his street clothes and was only carrying an umbrella.
I looked at his face. Lately, I was beginning to be able to perceive people’s emotional state from the look in their eyes. Hoping to find some clue as to why he would talk to me, even if doing so seemed to displease him, I met his stare.
I didn’t say anything else. I was juggling the efforts of inspecting his expression while keeping my own emotions in check, and he lost patience first. He gritted his teeth and spat my name as if it was a bitter-tasting bug in his mouth.
“What about you, [Uninteresting Classmate]? What are you doing around here?”
I wasn’t particularly bothered that he left off the “-kun” this time. What stuck with me was that he didn’t sound like he was calling me [Uninteresting Classmate]. How he said my name came off more like [Unforgivable Person], or something like that. I didn’t understand why he would think that, but I decided to go with it until I knew more.
When I didn’t respond, he sneered and said, “What’s the matter, [Unforgivable Person], didn’t you hear me? I asked you what you’re doing here.”
“I had an errand.”
“It’s Sakura, isn’t it?”
Hearing that familiar name, my chest tightened. My breath caught in my throat, and I couldn’t speak right away. He wasn’t in the mood for waiting.
He repeated, “I said, it’s Sakura, isn’t it?”
I stayed mute.
“Say something!”
Grasping at some faint hope that he was mistaken, I said, “If by Sakura, you mean the girl in our class, then yes.”
He clenched his teeth, and in that moment, I knew beyond any doubt that his animosity was directed at me. I just didn’t know why he felt that way.
I tried to think it through, but quickly found the answer from the next thing he said.
“Why would Sakura,” he said, interrupted by his own heavy breathing. I waited. “Why would Sakura be with someone like you?”
Oh. I get it.
I almost spoke my revelation aloud but consciously decided not to. Now I knew what he felt. I scratched my head, uncomfortable. This was going to be tedious.
If only he’d stop and listen, I could talk my way around this in any number of ways, or possibly given him a proper explanation, but his misdirected anger had deprived him of reason.
I considered the possibility that we hadn’t run into each other today by accident. I could conceive countless scenarios; for instance, maybe he had tailed us from school.
He was probably in love with her. And now he was wrongly jealous of me. He’d lost the ability to observe with objectivity; he’d lost perspective. What else had he lost?
I decided to start with the tactic I saw as mostly likely to succeed: explaining the truth.
I said, “Our relationship isn’t what you think it is.”
Rage filled his eyes. This isn’t going well, I thought, but before I could say anything else, he pressed me further, this time his voice combative and loud, drowning out the rain.
“Then you tell me what the hell it is! You’re eating together, just the two of you, going on vacation, and today you went to her house alone. The whole class is talking about you. You’ve started clinging to her, out of nowhere.”
I was a little curious how word of our trip had gotten out.
I explained, “I wouldn’t say I’m clinging to her. I guess I’m not sure what I’d call it. If I said I was letting her go out with me, that would be too arrogant, but if I said she was letting me go out with her, that wouldn’t be giving myself enough credit.”
Noticing he had winced both times I said we were going out, I quickly clarified, “When I say we’re going out together, I don’t mean, like, going out going out. We’re not dating.” I shook my head. “In any case, what’s going on with me and her isn’t what you or the rest of our class thinks it is.”
“She’s spending time with you.”
After a moment, I said, “That’s right.”
His words dripped with hate. “With someone as sullen and antisocial as you.”
I didn’t have an argument there. I assumed that was how I came off, and maybe that was how I really was.
If he wanted to know why she would choose to spend her time with me, well, so did I. She’d told me I was the only person who could give her normalcy and reality. I believed her, but somehow that answer seemed insufficient.
I kept quiet. He glared at me intensely, but his expression remained frozen, and he just stood there in the rain.