INTERLUDE IV
IT WAS THE FALL of our second year of junior high. I walked home with heavy, plodding footsteps that evening, following the gut-wrenching revelation that Kanae would leave Sodeshima for Tokyo at the end of ninth grade. Trudging up the stairs, I unlocked the door to our family’s apartment and let myself in. My brother was still at baseball practice, and my mom was working her night job at the hostess bar, so I was home alone at this hour, as per usual. I slipped out of my shoes and walked down the dimly lit hallway, the floorboards creaking beneath my feet. I dumped my book bag on the ground in the living room, then hobbled over to the bathroom so I could look in the mirror. My face was haggard and pale, and I could even see some slight wrinkles on my forehead. I was suddenly very grateful that it was so dark outside. I would not have wanted Kanae to see me like this.
“Ha ha…”
My face looked so ridiculous, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. And as I did, all of the tears that I’d been holding back finally broke free and began trickling down my cheeks. My laughter slowly shifted into weeping, and then I fell to my knees, right there in the bathroom. I couldn’t take it anymore. When at last there were no tears left to shed, I got up, walked over to my bedroom, and collapsed face-first onto the bed. I couldn’t even be bothered to change out of my school uniform.
“Tokyo, huh…”
I pulled out my cell phone and searched “cost of living tokyo transfer student.” Some cursory article browsing suggested that living expenses would run me several tens of thousands of yen per month at the very least, plus a couple hundred thousand for the initial move, not to mention potential enrollment, textbook, and tuition fees. I tried to add it all up in my head, but it quickly began to feel pointless. It was futile for me to think I could ever afford to live in Tokyo, and trying to work out the logistics would only give me a migraine. I would simply have to come to terms with the fact that after we graduated from junior high, I might never see Kanae again—and yet the mere thought was enough to make me start crying all over again, even when I thought my tear ducts had already run dry. What in the world was I supposed to do?
The inevitability of losing my best friend loomed over me all through the winter, and when spring came, Kanae and I began our final year at Sodeshima Junior High. Our relationship remained in a sort of stasis where all we really did was continue walking home together, growing neither closer nor further apart. Then spring turned to summer, and about halfway through the hottest months of the year, I retired from the swim team, so I had a lot more time on my hands that I could spend with Kanae.
Our junior high careers were rapidly drawing to a close by this point. So naturally, I started trying to think of ways in which I could stretch out my remaining time with him as much as possible. Obviously, the easiest way to have all the time I wanted with him would be to simply ask him not to move to Tokyo, but I could never do that, not after telling him I would support his decision. It wasn’t like I was his girlfriend, let alone a family member, so what right did I have to complain about the educational path he’d already chosen? All I could really do was sit there in anguish as Kanae told me about all the arrangements he was making for the big move.
“So hey, I finally picked what high school I’m gonna try to aim for,” he told me on the way home after class got out one day. “You know the U of I, right? Well, I’ve decided to take the test for their official feeder school. Their watermark for acceptance is a little high, but if I make it in, I’ll be able to just ride the escalator system and coast all the way into college.”
Feeder school. Escalator system. These were both terms that I was familiar with, of course, but they were concepts that were so far removed from my lower-class means and unambitious educational goals that they never registered in my brain whenever I heard people talking about them—they would go straight in one ear and out the other. All I could really offer him were vapid encouragements like “Wow, good for you!” or “Don’t worry, you’ve got this,” and it made me feel like a pathetic excuse for a friend.
When I got home that night, I looked up the high school he was trying to test into. Kanae had mentioned that the barrier to entry was “a little high,” but even that was selling it short. What made my jaw drop even more than the acceptance threshold, however, were the tuition costs. I could never, ever afford to go there on my family’s income. The inescapable reality that I would never be able to live in Tokyo with him was becoming so overwhelmingly evident that it was like walls were closing in around me, eager to crush what little hope I had left.
And yet still I cheered Kanae on, staying as supportive as possible on the outside while in a state of constant suffering on the inside. No matter how much time went by, this was one pill that proved too hard for me to swallow, and before I knew it, it was fall again. It was under those overcast autumn skies, right as the winds began to grow colder, that my older brother broke his shoulder.
I didn’t know how it happened. I was sitting alone at home one evening when all of a sudden, my mom and brother came in the front door together—a rarity in and of itself. My brother’s face was white as a sheet. My mother looked downright heartbroken. It wasn’t until later that I learned he’d had some sort of flare-up of inflammation in his shoulder that was causing him an awful lot of pain.
“It’s sounding like he’ll need to undergo surgery for it,” my mother explained. “He might never be able to play baseball again. He’s taking it really hard, so please try not to bring it up, okay?”
I nodded. She didn’t have to tell me twice; I knew better than to kick the hornets’ nest on a touchy subject like that. My brother had approached me earlier himself and warned me not to tell anyone about his injury under any circumstances. The whole thing didn’t really faze me all that much at the time anyway, as my mind was much too preoccupied with Kanae’s imminent departure to spare more than a passing thought for my brother. That is, until one particular night when I was sitting at my desk doing homework, and I heard him cursing angrily through my bedroom wall.