The old folks cup their hands around their ears.
“A little louder, Cherry,” asks Miyuki. Cherry stands up as straight as he can, takes a deep breath, and exhales loudly. Then he holds up the strip of paper again, his shoulders shaking even more than before. Even from this far, I can tell how hard he’s straining.
After a few moments of silence:
“The shopping mall melts away amid the crimson rays of the sunset!”
He plows through it pretty quickly. The group members look at one another, then smile and clap for Cherry. His shoulders are still shaking, but his skin has managed to return to normal. And maybe it is just my imagination, but it’s like I can feel waves of anger shooting out from his back.
“Thank you very much,” Miyuki says softly. I glance at her face; it kind of feels like she is saying, “Sorry to force you into that,” with her eyes. Without making eye contact with her, Cherry returns the strip of paper and walks back toward his original seat. Then he stops midway.
“…Haiku,” he says assertively. Everyone, myself included, listens. “…Haiku’s an art that uses the written word… They don’t have to be read aloud…”
With that, Cherry puts his headphones over his ears. It’s pretty awkward.
“…True,” Miyuki says softly, “but don’t you think there are some aspects that can only be conveyed when you say them out loud?”
That startles me a bit. Things you can only convey when you say them out loud… I don’t hear the comments from my viewers. I just read them, and I assume that lets me understand their feelings. But what if I misread them?
Cherry’s mouth moves slightly. It sounds like he is saying something, but I can’t hear it from this far away.
“Voice of the cicada! Even reaching the ears of the girl in the mask!”
The dandelion-headed old man near Cherry suddenly shouts so loudly that the people around him visibly flinch… Wait. Is he looking at me?
“Voice of the cicada, even reaching the ears of the girl in the mask…”
Now he is slowly pointing at me. Cherry and the rest of the crowd look in our direction. Oh, crap! They caught me peeping on them! And not just me, but Julie and Marie, too. My sisters freak out, standing up and sitting down as they try to hide behind the glass (not that they could!). Then they finally give up, and we all say, “Sorry,” in unison.
That evening, for some reason, Cherry and I decide to walk home together. “We’ll go home first,” Julie and Marie say, giving me sinister smiles.
Normally, I’d be nervous about going home alone with a boy. This farm road I usually take is like my own little world to me. I can tell I’m acting strangely self-conscious around him. I thought it’d be a little awkward to walk too close to him, so I step along the far right edge of the path and Cherry takes the left side, across some low grass.
Still, I can see that Cherry is even more nervous than I am. If anything, I feel like I’m being completely brushed off. Like, I’ve spoken to him a few times along the way, but the conversation’s been extremely one-sided so far. Besides…I have something to ask him: Do my front teeth stick out too much or not…?
“So you’re one year older than me, Sakura?”
“…Looks like it.”
Cherry’s real name is Sakura. Yui Sakura. Yui’s a pretty rare name for a boy. Yui Sakura. Yui. Sakura… Oh.
“That’s why they call you Cherry?”
“Huh?”
“Sakura. Your last name.”
“Oh, um…yeah.”
And here I thought it was because his face turned cherry red all the time… Actually, maybe that’s the origin after all. But after the time we spent at the mall, I feel like that isn’t something I should ask him about.
“Cherry sounds pretty cute.”
Kind of a cute reverberance to it. Cherry, huh…?
“Cherry… You don’t mind being called that, right?”
He doesn’t reply, that same vaguely peeved look still on his face. And he has kept those headphones on the entire time. Does he not want to talk to me?
“What are you listening to?”
“Huh?! N-nothing…” He takes them off his ears. “I’m not actually listening to anything.”
He’s not?
“I’ve always had a hard time with loud noises…so this is kind of, like, noise canceling for me…”
Aha.
“Plus…this way, people don’t talk to me, so…”
So he really doesn’t want to talk to me?
“Oh, but not that I don’t want you talking to me, Smile…!”
Cherry apologizes to me, trying to backtrack; he must have picked up on my feelings.
“So nobody talks to you, huh…? Yeah, that’s a pretty smart idea!”
I really mean it, but it seems to confuse Cherry even more. But I kind of get it—the idea of wearing headphones so nobody talks to you. If I have a mask on, nobody’s going to talk about my buckteeth. Usually, they’ll just think I have a cold or something.
“Summer cold?”
“Huh?!”
It feels like he was reading my mind for a moment.
“No, this is just…!”
I deny it in a panic—but ohhh, maybe he thought that was weird! …Sure wish I could change the subject.
“But hey, why do you have a dictionary with your smartphone?”
…Oh, am I coming on as too friendly now?
Cherry takes out his phone. “Oh, the saijiki?” His case is the same brand as mine, and the same mint and vanilla, but there is no ☆ on it. No wonder we mixed them up.
Still, though…
“What’s a saijiki?”
“It’s like a dictionary for haiku.”
Oh, he smiled a little?
“There’s an app for it, too…but I kinda like the book version better.”
Cherry opens the case and runs a hand over the saijiki, gazing at it fondly. A dictionary for haiku? I didn’t know that existed.
…Huh? Cherry seems to be enjoying himself a lot more now that we are talking about haiku. I feel like an invisible barrier between us has vanished.
“You like haiku?”
“…I post them on Curiosity and stuff.”
“Oh, I so get that!”
“…?”
“Like, that way, more people will get to see them, right?”
Connecting with tens of thousands of people in real life at the same time is a world that I, a normal high school girl, could never have imagined. But my phone makes it totally possible. I think that’s really amazing.
“I so understand that!”
Wanting to upload that stuff to Curiosity… That’s so me.
“I have no idea who reads them…”
Despite my excitement, Cherry is almost whispering, his gloomy face staring at his phone. The invisible barrier has flipped right back up.
“Does haiku come to you quickly?” I ask through the barrier.
“When I’m on a roll, yes…”
“Wow.”
Oh, good. He isn’t offended after all. I guess it must have relieved me a bit, so I casually ask: “Can you make one now?”
Cherry looks shook. I think that might’ve been a bad idea.
“Oh! Sorry. That was out of line, maybe.”
Cherry has stopped, so I’m a little bit farther down the path, which means I have to look back at him. We are just at the small bridge over an irrigation canal. Sometimes I get asked to do the “Smile For Me” pose while I’m streaming, and it always throws me for a loop. I do it right at the start of my stream, after all, not throughout the stream. When people don’t pick up on that, it gets kind of awkward for me. Cherry looks really annoyed, too; I think I might have actually offended him this time.
He is looking down a little, with a thoughtful expression. He seems angry, but really, he appears to be off in his own little world. His furrowed eyebrows suddenly relax into a gentle curve. Instantly, I feel like the barrier disappears again. Cherry slowly raises his head and looks at me, but…like, it feels like he is seeing right through me, looking at something farther away…
After a while of this, his head falls again, and he slowly closes his eyes.
“Summer’s lustrous sheen… There’s a false start in the wind…and the evening dusk…”
A small whisper. But I hear it clearly. The five-seven-five rhythm. Even I can pick up on it.
This is a haiku. One Cherry just made up. It’s amazing. He really can come up with one just like that. I’m kind of impressed. But there’s one thing I don’t understand.
“What does ‘lustrous sheen’ mean?”
It didn’t sound familiar to me. Some kinda haiku thing?
“Oh, it’s just a way to describe light. It’s a seasonal phrase that evokes summer.”
Cherry points behind me toward the main road beyond the rice paddies. I turn around to look, and there I see that there are streetlamps lined up at equal intervals. It is evening now, but it isn’t that dark yet. The streetlights are on even though the sky is still decently bright, as if signaling that night is about to fall. I usually don’t pay attention to this kind of thing, but looking at it this way, it’s almost otherworldly.
I try to say Cherry’s haiku out loud.
“Summer’s lustrous sheen, there’s a false start in the wind and the evening dusk…”
…It’s funny. I have an image of haiku as being old-fashioned, but this one feels different…
“…Cute.”
As I gaze at the lights, I can’t help but express my honest feelings.
“I think your poem’s really cute, Cherry.”
I turn to find Cherry red as a cherry, just like I saw him at the mall. He is giving me this strange stare—and this time, I can tell his eyes are on me. Then his bright red gradually changes back to its original color. He slowly approaches me, still staring. He takes off the headphones.
“…How?”
His voice is dead-serious. So I think about it more carefully. My instincts tell me it is cute, but what is it about this haiku that made me think that?
“The ‘false start in the wind’ part, for example.”
I think there’s something cute about that. That’s why I said it, but Cherry doesn’t seem to get it. His strange gaze doesn’t let up.
“In the wind,” he mumbles, as if thinking hard about what it means. Oh. I get it. Hearing this, it makes perfect sense to me. Now I know what I find cute about it.
“…Your voice.”
“…?”
It may not be haiku-style cuteness, and it may not be a proper answer at all, but I’m certain of it as I tell Cherry. When it comes to cute, I’m always confident in my tastes.
“Your voice! I think it’s cute!”