“Akiko…um, hee-hee, like, a date?”
Toughboy continues to mumble before noticing I am there.
“Ah! Dammit, Cherry!”
He calls me Cherry, too, even though we aren’t friends.
Akiko said that he suddenly started reporting to Sunnyside more often after she started working there. I remember Nami grinning and telling me, “Akiko said to me, you know, ‘Nami, isn’t Toughboy the lamest nickname ever?’ He has no idea she said that, either.” By the way, this nickname comes from the words TOUGH ☆ BOY written on this T-shirt he wore once. He has it on again today, the words dancing in front of my eyes right now.
“You know where that Beaver guy is, don’t you?”
“No.”
“That asshole graffitied my car, man.”
He pulls his phone out of his pocket and holds it out to me. I wince as it almost hits me in the face. On the phone is a photo of a white car, the words Toughboy was hear!! scrawled on it. Pretty big, too.
“Toughboy was hear…?”
I think he meant here, but whatever.
“Don’t screw with me, Cherry Boy! ’Cause I’ll rip you apart if you do!”
Toughboy turns his anger on me. Guess he didn’t like me reading that out loud. He comes even closer to my face, threatening me.
“…I’m not.”
Toughboy looks unconvinced.
“Well, if I see him again, I’m gonna beat his ass! Tell him that for me, man!”
Then he leaves with Mr. Fujiyama. He must have inherited the volume of his voice from his grandfather.
“Well,” Ms. Tanaka says, “it’s not quite five o’clock, but you can go ahead and clock out now, Sakura.”
Oh. Guess I spent quite a bit of time looking for Mr. Fujiyama.
“Okay.”
Ms. Tanaka points to her ears with both index fingers and smiles at me, looking distressed… Oh. I rush to take off my headphones.
I change out of my work clothes and leave through the employee entrance. The entire loading dock in front of me is shadowed by the buildings around it; even the large trucks parked there are completely shaded. It is still light out, but I can tell evening is approaching. The heat has eased up considerably.
I feel a little thirsty. I haven’t had anything to drink since noon because I spent so much time looking for Mr. Fujiyama. I decide to buy a soda from a vending machine near the entrance. Unsweetened seltzer is all the rage right now, but I’m not a fan. I want just a little bit of sweetness. Unsweetened feels a little too grown-up.
So I buy my usual soda from the machine and take a sip. The moderate sweetness quenches my thirst. It’s the best out there, really.
Suddenly, I notice a fence near the vending machine that looks like a construction barricade. It’s a steel plate striped with orange and black diagonal lines, and on top of it there’s a piece of white cloth with a now-familiar scrawl.
In ultramarine, the blue-and-white flycatcher evokes a straight line.
I posted that on Curiosity last week… Beaver again? He’s probably at his secret hideout on the rooftop again today. I had planned to go home, but keeping what Toughboy said in mind, I might as well pay the hideout a visit.
A parking lot on the roof of a shopping mall is a common sight in Japan, but the scenery is so monotonous up there that I almost get lost whenever I come up. The location of the escalators and elevators in the building don’t seem to match up in my mind with the accesses to the parking lot. When my father and I take the car to go shopping here, we normally use this lot, and then it takes forever tracking down our car when we’re done.
I exit the elevator hall on the rooftop to the lot. There’s no ceiling, so the evening sun is illuminating everything. The area in front of the elevator hall is shaded, which helps a little.
Turning around, I look up at the wall of the elevator hall, which looks like a square shed, and see a horizontal blue sign that reads ENTRANCE C. This is the landmark I have to look out for. I glance around. After confirming that no one is watching me, I move to the side. Quickly climbing over a chest-high fence, I take the ramp heading away from the wall. As I ascend, I check again to make sure there are no witnesses. From here, I have a good view of the entire parking lot. A lot of cars are parked there, but luckily there’s nobody around.
Climbing up the ramp puts me on the roof of the elevator hall. It’s a flat area, about half the size of the sunlit parking lot, and there’s graffiti all over the floor. It’s all Beaver’s scrawls…and it’s all my haiku. In fact, aren’t there more than the last time I was here?
Beaver calls this place his secret hideout. He keeps decorating it with stuff from the mall stores, and now it looks like someone overturned a toy chest. I don’t know how he got it all up here, but there is a child-size shopping cart (complete with a doll of Odamaru, mascot of the city of Oda), a beach umbrella, and even a tent to provide shade. Beaver’s always had a habit of bringing stuff here from all sorts of places; that’s why I gave him the nickname Beaver. I think his real name is Pablo or Paulo or something, but Beaver fits him better in many ways.
One day, he brought me here, saying, “I found this awesome secret hideout.” There was nothing here at the time, but now there’s even a running fan, connected to a reel-type extension cord. It blows air toward the tent.
I can hear Hikarun’s voice—the way Beaver imitates it—saying, “Ohhh, Japaaan…” Inside the tent, Beaver is holding a masklike object in front of his face and wriggling his body around. Across from him is a pudgy guy with his arms crossed, staring at Beaver with a pout on his face. He has a head of naturally curly hair, large glasses, and wears an apron from the store Hand Off on the mall’s third floor. This is Japan, and he looks a lot like a giant Buddha statue.
I thought Beaver was holding a mask in front of his face, but it is actually Hikarun…or, to be exact, the head of the Toy Box cutout. It’s the same Hikarun that’d bowled me over earlier.