The day following my stint as prey at the bookstore, the girl sent me a text telling me to come visit her right away. This was unusual; for my past two visitations, she’d at least given me a day’s notice. I thought something might have happened to her, but that proved not to be the case. When I arrived she gave me an unclouded smile and said, “How about you break me out of this hospital?”
What I read as urgency in her texts turned out to be excited impatience. She couldn’t wait to let me in on her latest idea for mischief.
“No way,” I said. “I don’t want to be made into a murderer.”
“It’s okay. When the guy in a love story spirits his dying sweetheart from the hospital, everyone knows she’s going to die on the trip. People will understand.”
“By that logic, someone could be straddling a tub of scalding hot water saying he sure hopes nobody comes along and pushes him in, and I could push him in and still get away with it.”
“Wouldn’t you get away with it?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “I’d be arrested for criminal injury, or worse. So if you want to escape from the hospital, find some sweetheart who doesn’t care if he shortens your life.”
She clicked her teeth and spun a hair tie on her finger as if she was actually disappointed. That surprised me. Did she really think I would go along with something that put her in real danger? Even as a joke, I wouldn’t have expected her to suggest such a foolish and life-threatening action.
Was she not joking? I looked at her face with that same familiar smile, and I felt uneasy. But the feeling quickly melted away.
She then suggested I help her escape from her room, and we went to a little store on the third floor. She walked in front of me as she towed along the rolling stand and IV bag so the tube wouldn’t pull out from her arm. Seeing her like that, she truly looked like a sick person.
We were eating ice cream bars on a couch near the shop when she said, “Hey, do you know why sakura bloom in the spring?”
I wondered what had made her choose this subject.
I said, “You bloom in the spring? I don’t even know what that means.”
“Have I ever referred to myself in the third person? Did you confuse me with another girl named Sakura you’ve been hanging out with? I didn’t know you were a cheat. Maybe you should die, too.”
“Could you stop trying to drag me along just because you think heaven will be too dull without me? Now there’s a thought—you should make sure your funeral is held on a tomobiki day.”
Tomobiki days were superstitiously believed to be conducive to spreading one’s fortune, whether good or ill, to one’s friends.
“No way!” she said. “I want my friends to keep living.”
“Maybe for your summer homework, you could write me a report on why you’d be fine with me dying. Anyway, you were asking why sakura trees bloomed in the spring. Isn’t that just the kind of flower it is?”
I thought that to be a respectable guess, but she snorted derisively. I held back the strong urge to smoosh my lemon-flavored ice cream bar all over her nose.
Sensing my displeasure, she chuckled and got to her point.
“I’ll tell you why. Did you know that after the sakura petals fall, the next buds grow within the next three months? But the buds sleep. They wait for warm weather to come, then they all bloom at once. In other words, sakura trees wait for the time they’re supposed to bloom. Isn’t that wonderful?”
I thought she was attributing too much conscious thought between the flowers’ behavior. They were simply waiting for the insects and birds to come bearing pollen, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, my thoughts went in a different direction.
I said, “Your name is a perfect fit.”
“Because I’m a beautiful flower? You’ll make me blush.”
“No, because you’re named after a flower that chooses to bloom in spring, just like you believe that our choices, not random chance, determine the people we encounter and the events in our lives.”
She looked stunned for a moment, then became very happy and said, “Thank you.”
I didn’t understand why that made her so happy. I hadn’t meant what I said as a compliment, just as an interesting fact, like how the clothes suited her when we were shopping.
She said, “Your name matches you well, too, [???]-kun.”
“I don’t know. Does it?”
“Look,” she said, laughing proudly as she pointed back and forth at herself and me. “Death is next to you. Get it?” She was referring to the characters of my name. “Death and the spring tree?”
Once again, the feeling struck me that something was off with her; that sense had permeated our entire conversation.
She was nibbling at her watermelon popsicle, and as always, she seemed as if she was going to live forever. That hadn’t changed, but there was something in her joke that reminded me of… I needed a moment to finish the thought, but then it came to me: She reminded me of a kid on the last day of summer vacation scrambling to finish a procrastinated independent study assignment.
Has something happened to her? I wondered with genuine concern. But I didn’t ask. That hint of urgency I saw in her seemed only natural. She only had a year left to live. The times she managed to remain unperturbed were the oddity.
And so, I filed away the sense of wrongness I felt that day as something insignificant, a creation of my subjective point of view.
I thought I was right.