Instead I said, “What makes you ask that all of a sudden?”
“We’re at a restaurant where there’re only girls, but it just seems to have thrown you out of sorts. And when a cute one walks by our table, you don’t give her a glance. Even I take a glance, but not you.”
So much for trying not to appear shaken. I resolved to work on my acting ability; I wondered if I could improve before she died.
I replied, “I don’t like being somewhere I don’t belong, and staring at people is rude. I don’t act rude.”
“That sounds like you’re calling me rude,” she said, puffing out her cheeks. With the whipped cream still on her nose, this expression was even more amusing than the one before, like the kind of face you’d make on purpose if you were trying to make someone laugh.
“Here’s a rude question for you,” she said. “You told me yesterday you’ve never had a girlfriend or a friend. That got me wondering: Have you ever even liked anyone before?”
“It’s not that I don’t like people. You could say I like everyone.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. But have you ever like-liked anyone?” She sighed and popped a piece of chicken into her mouth. She seemed to be getting acclimated to my twisting of words. “Surely you’ve had a one-sided crush before. Unrequited love.”
“Unrequited love?”
“That’s the one that’s not requited,” she offered.
“Thanks,” I said. “I know what it means.”
“Okay, talk about it then. Have you ever had a crush?”
I decided making a big deal of it would just be even more of a hassle. I didn’t want to anger her like the day before; I was no match for that.
“Maybe once,” I said. “I guess.”
“That’s the spirit. All right, out with it. What was she like?”
“Why do you want to know so bad?”
“I just want to,” she said. “You said we’re opposites, didn’t you? I’m curious what kind of girl you’d like.”
I thought about telling her to become her opposite, and then she’d know for herself. But I didn’t like pushing my values onto other people, so I didn’t say it.
“Let me think,” I said. “What kind of girl was she… She added ‘-san’ to everything.”
The girl brought her eyebrows together and twitched her nose. The whipped cream moved with it. Confused, she asked, “San?”
“You know, like after people’s names, to be polite? But with everyone. She was in my class in junior high, and she’d say bookseller-san, store clerk-san, fish seller-san. She did it with authors’ names in our textbooks. Akutagawa-san, Dazai-san, Mishima-san. She even did it with her food. Daikon-san, if you can believe it. Now that I think about it, it might have just been a habit of hers, like a vocal tic that had nothing to do with the kind of person she was. At the time, I thought it meant she held on to respect for the people and things around us. It represented kindness and elegance. Because of that, I felt something a little different for her than I did for anyone else.”
Having said all that, I took a drink of water before adding, “I don’t know if it counts as unrequited love.”
I looked at my classmate; she didn’t say a word. She simply smiled and took a bite of her fruit-covered cake. As she chewed, her smile deepened. I was beginning to wonder what she was thinking when she rubbed her finger on her cheek and lowered her head, looking up at me with her eyes.
I asked, “What?”
“Nothing,” she said. She wiggled a little bit. “Nothing, it’s just, that’s sweeter than I was expecting. It’s gotten me a little flustered.”
“Oh. Well, yeah, I guess she was sweet.”
“No, I’m talking about the reason you liked her.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I copied her and took a bite of my ground beef steak. It tasted good, too. She was watching me with a smile more pleasant than her usual one.
She asked, “What came of it? But I guess you already said—you never had a girlfriend.”
“Yeah. Well, in this case, what was on the outside matched the inside. She was cute, and some cheerful, popular guy in my class took her instead.”
“Hm. Then she didn’t have an eye for people.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Never mind,” she said. “So there was a time when you were pure-hearted and stirring with fleeting love.”
“Sure,” I said. “Just out of courtesy, I’ll ask you the same.”
“I’ve had three boyfriends,” she replied. “Just to be clear, I took all my relationships seriously. A lot of people say junior high romances are just games, but they’re idiots who don’t want to take responsibility for their feelings.”
She was getting heated, both in her words and her expression. I shrank back a bit. I wasn’t good with heat.
For what it was worth, with her looks, I easily believed she’d had three boyfriends. She didn’t seem to wear much makeup, and she wasn’t some beauty who would make anyone’s head turn, but her features were striking.
Seeing me shift, she protested, “Hey, don’t pull away.”
“I’m not pulling away. But you’ve got something on your nose. Some whipped cream.”
“Huh?” she said, looking foolish as she failed to process it right away. If that was how she looked all the time, she might not have gotten any boyfriends. Finally understanding what I’d said, she scrambled for her napkin and put it to her nose. I stood from my chair before she finished wiping the whipped cream away. I wasn’t trying to leave again—my plate was just empty.
Thinking I’d try a little dessert, I got a second plate at the buffet. I was searching around for just the right thing, when, as luck would have it, I found one of my favorite sweets: warabi-mochi, a chilled, jelly-like treat, perfect for the summer. I put a few on my plate and drizzled them with the provided brown sugar syrup, which flowed from the ladle with an artistic beauty. When I broke from my rapture, I decided to get a cup of hot coffee while I was up.
As I weaved my way through the mass of school girls, I tried thinking of how to get her out of her bad mood. What had worked the day before? When I got back to our table, my fears proved false, and she was cheerful again.
But something else kept me from sitting back in my seat.
When my classmate saw me, her smile deepened. The girl who occupied my seat noticed her expression change and turned my way. The second girl’s mouth opened in surprise. I recognized her from somewhere.
The other girl said, “S-Sakura, when you said you came here with someone, you meant [Gloomy Classmate]-kun?”
She came off as even more headstrong than my lunch companion. After a moment, I placed her: I’d often seen the two girls doing things together at school. I thought she might have been on one of the sports teams.