INTERLUDE III
AS SOON AS I GRADUATED from elementary school, I stopped taking swimming lessons over on the mainland, because I knew once I entered Sodeshima Junior High, I could just join the school swim team…and that’s exactly what I did. It didn’t take any time at all for me to ingratiate myself with the other members of the team, possibly because most of them had already heard about the crazy lap times I was getting as an elementary schooler. It felt like all eyes were on me; the eighth and ninth graders all had high expectations of me, as did my advisers, and the other seventh graders all looked up to me as if I were invincible.
Being a part of a competitive team did more for my swimming skills than I ever could have hoped. The only major downside was that now, I had to stay late for swim practice every day, which meant significantly less time to hang out with Kanae after school. Heck, the only reason we got to spend any time together at all was because he would hang back in the library and wait for me to get done. As soon as practice was over, I was always the fastest to get changed out of my swimsuit and back into my school uniform so that I could dash out of the locker room to meet Kanae over in the library, at which point he and I would head home together. It was usually so late by then that we would head straight home, but every once in a while, we’d stop by the little candy store in town on our way.
I remembered how, on one such occasion, the two of us were sitting next to each other on the bench right outside of the candy store, drinking our respective bottles of Cheerio as the hot setting sun in the western sky cast its final rays warmly against my right cheek.
“Man, why does it feel like soda always tastes better in a glass bottle—y’know what I mean?” I casually pondered aloud when I was about halfway through my melon-flavored beverage.
“What, you never learned about this?” he asked. “It’s because the carbonation dissolves some molecular component in the glass that activates your taste buds. Everyone knows that.”
“Wait, seriously? So it’s not even the soda I’m tasting, but the glass itself? That’s nuts!”
“Wow, you’re so gullible. I made that up.”
“Huh…? Oh, you were messing with me. Gotcha,” I said. My voice echoed in the bottle as I brought it back up to my lips for another swig. Then I looked over at Kanae, who was apparently unsatisfied with this response.
“You really don’t get angry very often, do you, Akari?”
“I don’t?”
“Like, hardly at all. Most people get at least a little upset when someone pulls their leg like that. I mean, when was the last time you got really angry about something? Do you even remember?”
I thought about it for a while but couldn’t think of any recent instances. I could think of plenty of times when I probably should have gotten mad, but I was the sort of person who’d sooner mope and feel sorry for myself than lose my temper.
“Yeah, I’m not sure I ever get mad, really,” I said. “I don’t like being confrontational…”
“Well, you probably need to work on that. People aren’t gonna take you seriously if you never lay down the law. You might be fine for right now, but once you’re in eighth grade, you’ve gotta be able to exert your authority over the incoming seventh graders,” Kanae declared, nodding as if in agreement with himself. “Hey, I know! Why don’t you try getting angry at me, just for the hell of it?”
“What, like, yell at you and stuff? No way. I don’t wanna do that.”
“Aw, c’mon! Think of it as practice! Show me your worst,” he said, turning his entire body to face me as he braced with anticipation. I still didn’t feel comfortable with this at all, but I decided to give it a good college try and raised my voice at him.
“H—hey, you…!”
A moment passed, then Kanae snorted out an amused laugh.
“Sure, whatever. Guess that works,” he snickered.
“Wow, rude. See if I ever do anything for you again…”
My face was flushed red from the embarrassment of trying something new—but I hadn’t hated trying it out. And as long as Kanae was laughing, I knew that all was right with the world. That was part of the reason I cherished even casual little interactions like these. Like pictures in a photo album, I made sure to hold on to each and every memory I had with him.
After the first few months of junior high, I started to notice some changes in my class environment. For one thing, the students had divided themselves up into two distinct factions: those who were good at sports or socializing, and those who weren’t. There was a massive divide between the two groups; whichever one you were a part of determined the people you were allowed to eat lunch with, as well as who you could talk to during passing periods.
Though I had nothing to offer outside of my swimming abilities, I was still inducted into the socialite faction through sheer peer pressure, and as a result I spent my passing periods with an entire posse of female classmates gathered around my desk. I vividly remembered feeling antsy all the time in that classroom—mainly because it left me with virtually zero chance to talk to Kanae, no matter how much I wanted to. He was a member of the “uncool” faction, after all. No matter how stupid and petty it sounded now, everything really did feel like a popularity contest at that age, so snubbing the “cool” kids to go talk to Kanae would be like committing social suicide.
I still walked home with him after practice each day, of course. That much never changed. Obviously, I wanted much more than that, but I lacked the courage to break free from our socially designated roles, not to mention the status quo of our current relationship. Which, in retrospect, may have been the reason Kanae ended up going the direction he did. It was from this point on that a rift began to form between the two of us.
One day, in the fall of our eighth-grade year, I walked into the classroom and found that someone, or a group of people, had written horrible things about Kanae all over the blackboard. They’d written his name in big letters in the center of the board, surrounded by things like “Loser,” “Everyone hates you,” and even “Kill yourself.”
“What the… Who did this…?” I muttered in disbelief, standing with my mouth agape at the front of the classroom. A moment later, Kanae came walking in behind me and, without a single word, began erasing all of the scribblings on the chalkboard. I scrambled to try to help him, but he practically shouted me down.
“It’s fine. I’ll do it myself,” he said. His tone of voice conveyed the real message, which was “stay the hell away from me right now.”
I was in shock. I wasn’t sure he’d ever told me off like that before. Until that day, I had no idea that the male bullies in our class had set their sights on Kanae. I asked one of my friends about it later, and they told me it was because he’d stuck up for another kid that they were bullying. Now that sounded like the Kanae I knew.
Unfortunately, their harassment of him didn’t stop with some mean words on the blackboard—they would often hide his shoes and textbooks, and even convinced a lot of our other classmates to ignore him completely. At first, Kanae was livid about all of this, but after a while, he gave up and simply took the harassment as it came. It was like something inside of him had died, or been extinguished. All I could do was watch from the sidelines. They were bound to make me their new target if I were to jump to his defense, just like they switched to Kanae after he stood up for the other kid. Besides…I didn’t want to do anything that might accidentally damage his pride.
Frustrated as I was that I couldn’t do anything to help, I did tell our homeroom teacher about the harassment at one point. I was assured that the school would do something about it—but of course they didn’t. I was left helpless to do anything but pretend not to notice how my best friend was being bullied relentlessly—some “friend” I was. The one sorry way in which I could try to atone was by being as bright and peppy as possible for him when we walked home together. I wanted to give him at least something fun to look forward to each day.
Winter came around the bend soon enough, but nothing changed. My swim team still had practice during the winter too. We would go swimming at an indoor pool on the mainland once a week, while the rest of the time we did all sorts of other basic exercises and drills. They’d make us do laps until we were all run ragged, and by the time practice was over, it would already be dark outside. Kanae would wait for me in the library, undaunted by the late hour, and we would walk home together in the bitter cold. No matter how exhausted from practice I was, I always tried my hardest to be as chipper and talkative as possible for his sake.
“Oh, man—so I read this manga the other day, right? And it’s, like, unbelievably good,” I gushed.
“Uh-huh,” he nodded.
“It’s got this, like, understated sci-fi thing goin’ on, all about this one girl on a journey through a post-apocalyptic world, but boy, lemme tell ya, I was not prepared for that gut-punch twist at the end.”
I waited, but Kanae didn’t say anything, so I kept going:
“Oh yeah, and in the afterword, the author says it was based on an amateur comic book she wrote back in high school. How crazy is that?! Imagine being so talented at such a young age. It’s really cool to see female authors getting more and more—”
“Hey, Akari?” Kanae stopped in the middle of the sidewalk as he cut me off.