INTERLUDE II
ALL MY MEMORIES of Kanae from our elementary school days were still vivid in my mind, so vivid that every time I looked back on them, it was like flipping through the pages of a beautifully illustrated children’s book. Like, for example, this one interaction we had back in the third grade on our way home from school. It was a cool July afternoon, and we were sitting on the seawall like we always did, whiling away the hours. We would often sit there talking until the sun went down, usually about utterly trivial things: a stray cat someone found near the shrine, a classmate of ours who snuck his handheld game console into class, a book that one of us had borrowed from the library. On that particular day, though, I specifically remembered Kanae gushing to me about something of actual import.
“Hey, so guess what?” he grinned. “A bunch of junior high kids tried to gang up on me the other day, but then your brother came outta nowhere and scared ’em off.”
“Whoa, really?”
“Yep. He was so cool, I’m tellin’ ya. Can’t believe he knows how to fight, and he’s good at baseball… Wish I could be like him someday.”
“You do, huh…?”
I never liked my older brother very much, mainly because he was always picking on me, but even I had to admit that what Kanae claimed he did was pretty cool. In fact, I was genuinely quite proud of him for sticking up for the defenseless like that.
“Man, if only I had something I was the best at…” Kanae mused.
“…I think you’re fine the way you are, Kanae-kun.”
“What, seriously? I feel like I should at least find some kind of sport or special talent I can show off to people. But what…?” he said, thinking aloud to himself before turning to face me. “You’re so lucky, Akari. I mean, you’re already a really good swimmer.”
“I’m not that good at swimming…”
“Sure you are. Heck, didn’t you get the fastest time out of our entire class the other day? That takes talent, right? Give yourself a little more credit.”
“Yeah, maybe…”
It was true that I was a pretty good swimmer—but I never liked pool days all that much, since they meant showing more of my unconventionally pigmented skin than I had to already. But hearing Kanae speak so highly of my skills made me really happy, and it was at that point that I decided I was going to start taking swimming more seriously.
Summer vacation rolled around, and I opted to sign up for a more advanced swim class that the school pool offered. The lessons were a lot harder than I expected going in, but they made an obvious improvement to my lap times. On the last day of summer vacation, my swim instructor came up to me and suggested I consider enrolling in more formal swimming lessons at a big aquatic center over on the mainland. He was adamant about the amount of potential he saw in me and insisted that I should at least talk to my family about it.
Mind you, I’d always fantasized about being able to take lessons at a huge indoor facility like that. Such a huge pool felt almost mandatory if you wanted enough space to swim your heart out, and I was sure that lying on your back in the middle of a vast pool of crystal-clear water felt sublime. But I’d pretty much given up on the idea, figuring it was impossible given our means. I already knew, even at that young age, that my family’s finances were pretty abysmal.
My mother supported my brother and I on her own, ever since my father died in a car crash when I was five. During the day, she worked the register at the supermarket, and at night, she mixed drinks at a local hostess bar. When I was really little, I pretty much convinced myself that my mother was some sort of superhuman that had evolved beyond the need for sleep—that was how hard she worked, day in and day out. To this day, I had no idea how or when she snuck in enough time to sleep. Needless to say, I didn’t want to put even more stress on my mom’s plate, so I opted not to ask her about the whole formal swimming lessons proposition at all—or that was the plan, anyway, until my instructor brought it up on parent-teacher conference night.
“I really think your daughter’s got talent, ma’am,” he said. “I think it’d be a travesty not to enroll her in more formal training.”
My mother was a polite person who was quick to cave under pressure, so she immediately agreed to his proposal, and before long, I was enrolled in legit swimming lessons. Could I have still pumped the brakes at this point? Absolutely. All I had to do was say I was getting sick and tired of swimming or that I wasn’t comfortable taking the ferry over to the mainland by myself. But I didn’t, which says a lot about how much I really cared about not overburdening my mother—as soon as it looked like it might actually happen, I shut up real quick.
To be fair to myself, I worked myself to the bone when my lessons began, training as hard as I possibly could so as not to let the tuition fees and ferry ticket costs go to waste. As a result of this, I became such a good swimmer that by sixth grade I came in first place at the big annual district swim meet. I was honored for this achievement at the next school assembly, and it was at that point that the other kids in my grade started paying a lot more attention to me, with some even wanting to be my friends. Since athletic ability is pretty much the only thing that determines a kid’s popularity in elementary school, I soon became the most popular kid in class. No one dared make fun of me for my appearance anymore.