The silence stretched long. So long, in fact, I thought our conversation must have been over. Maybe he had realized his rage was baseless, and he was overcome with regret just as I had been. Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he was still too angry to think.
I didn’t care which was true. Either way, neither of us had anything left to gain here. I thought if I turned my back and walked away, he’d just watch me go, so that’s what I did. Or maybe I simply wanted to be alone again as quickly as possible. I didn’t care which was true, my actions would have been the same.
If I’d truly stopped to think, I would have realized my only experience with people blinded by love were characters in my books. It was presumptuous to try and predict the actions of a living, breathing human being when I’d never had a true emotional connection with one before. Characters in a story weren’t like people in real life. Stories weren’t reality. Reality wasn’t as pretty.
I keenly felt his glare on my back as I walked away, but I didn’t turn to look. No one would have gained anything from that. I hoped that, by keeping my back to him, I would communicate how far-fetched it was that the girl could possibly be in love with someone who thought of human relationships as mathematical equations. The message probably didn’t get through.
I didn’t understand love wasn’t the only thing that could impair a man’s judgment; so could logic. Consequently, I didn’t realize he had followed me until his hand grabbed my shoulder.
“Wait!” he said.
I stopped and turned to look at him. Misunderstanding or not, I was getting tired of his attitude. I kept the annoyance from my expression.
“I’m not finished talking to you!” he said.
Maybe I was getting worked up, too. I’d never been in an altercation before—one person’s emotions butting against another’s. Looking back, I think in that moment, I had lost my capacity for rational thought.
Words came from my mouth with clearly no other purpose but to hurt him.
“Let me clue you in on something. It might do you some good.” I stared him in the eye and spoke with the intent of gutting him. “She hates clingy guys. I guess her previous boyfriend was that way.”
His expression contorted into something uglier than his earlier scowl. I didn’t know what the expression meant, but I didn’t care. Knowing wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
A strong impact struck me somewhere around my left eye. I stumbled backward, then fell butt-first onto the wet asphalt. The rain immediately seeped into my school uniform. My open umbrella clattered stupidly to the ground and rolled there. My school bag fell, too. With surprise and incomprehension, I looked up at him. I could barely see out of my left eye, the vision blurred.
Even though I didn’t know exactly what had happened, I understood I’d been the recipient of some sort of violence. A person doesn’t simply fall over of his own accord.
He shouted, “What do you mean, ‘clingy’? I… I…”
He was facing me, but I could plainly tell his words weren’t directed to me. I had incurred the wrath of a more powerful force. I had tried to hurt him but got hurt myself. I felt ashamed and deeply regretted what I had done.
This was my first time being punched, and it sure did hurt. I knew why I felt pain where he’d hit me, but I didn’t understand why I hurt on the inside, too. If the day kept going like this, I thought my heart might break.
Still sitting on the wet pavement, I looked up at him. My left eye still hadn’t recovered its vision.
Breathing heavily through his nose, this boy—who I guessed was probably her ex-boyfriend, although I didn’t know for sure at the time—looked down at me and said, “Someone like you has no right getting close to Sakura!”
He took something from his pocket and threw it at me. I uncrumpled the object and saw it was the bookmark I had lost. Now I could connect the dots.
“It was you,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
I had believed his handsome features were a reflection of his gentle nature. When he was guiding discussions at the front of the class, when he occasionally came to the library to borrow books, he had done so with an easygoing smile. But I’d only seen the image he carefully portrayed to the outside world, not what was in his heart. She had been right: What was real on the inside mattered, not appearances.
I thought about what I should do. I had hurt him first; calling his reaction self-defense wasn’t that much of a stretch. Sure, he may have gone a bit too far, but I couldn’t know how deeply I’d hurt him, so getting to my feet and punching him back didn’t seem appropriate.
Standing above me, he still seemed incensed. I needed to calm him down but saying the wrong thing to him—or maybe even the right thing—may just throw more fuel onto the fire. I was the one who had pushed him over the edge already.
As we stared at each other, I began thinking he was more in the right than I was. He must have truly liked her. Maybe his methods were a little clumsy—or rather, they were the cause of his troubles—but he was honest about his feelings toward her, and he wanted to spend his time with her.
That’s why he hated me: for stealing time they could have spent together.
And what of me? If I had never learned she would be dead in a year, I never would have gone out to eat with her, traveled with her, or spoiled things between us at her house. Her death connected us, but death awaited everyone. What else had brought us together but random chance? We had been spending time together because of a fluke. He wanted to be with her out of genuine intent and emotion. I had no such claim.
Even with my social inexperience, I understood one basic truth: The one who was in the wrong must yield to the one who was in the right.
Okay, then. I would let him beat me until he was satisfied. It was my fault for trying to have a relationship with someone without understanding how other people’s feelings worked.
I met his glaring eyes in an attempt to signal, I yield. But the message didn’t get through.
A figure appeared, standing behind the heavily breathing boy.
The girl said, “What…is going on?”
He turned as if struck by lightning. His umbrella jostled and sent raindrops spilling onto his shoulders. I watched them as if I was a spectator, unsure if her arrival was good timing or bad.
Holding her umbrella, she looked back and forth between the class representative and me as she tried to piece together what was going on.
He looked about to say something, but before he could, she ran over to me. She picked up my umbrella and offered it.