Sota was watching TV in the living room with the volume set low, but Toranosuke’s mom’s voice was so loud that he heard everything perfectly.
“I think I’m going neurotic! No one’s on my side!”
Each hysterical statement sent bolts of horror through him. In between two such panicked utterings, Sota’s mom managed to interrupt with “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to start working on dinner” and end the call.
Even when she took the phone away from her face to press the button on the screen, the voice continued squawking from the speaker.
Sota’s dad got home after that. From when Sota got out of the bath to when he went to bed, his mom’s phone kept buzzing. She never answered, though, only exhaled and watched it.
“You’re not going to pick up?” Sota inquired while drying his hair.
“Mm,” his mother responded uncomfortably. “It’s time for bed now.”
She pulled the vibrating phone close to her chest so Sota wouldn’t see.
Toranosuke did his homework every day.
He stopped forgetting to bring things. If he kicked something for no reason, or got violent against his friends, there was a class meeting after school, and someone raised their hand to call out his transgression.
“Toranosuke, you kicked the wall in the hallway today. Why did you do that?”
“When you were on cleaning duty, you threw the broom. Why did you do that?”
They all spoke with Niko’s mature tone.
At first, Toranosuke gave mocking or silly answers, like “Because I was angry” or “I didn’t do nothin’,” but they wouldn’t let up.
“Being angry doesn’t change what’s right and wrong.”
“You can’t say you didn’t do it. We all saw you.”
They didn’t just accuse him or point out bad behavior. They all pressed him on the why and demanded answers. No one accepted a facetious “Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry,” as good enough.
“If you’re sorry, what do you think you should have done?” they asked, cornering him. When he fell silent, looking thoroughly displeased, a different person raised their hand to speak.
“If you’re feeling angry, I think you should hit your own head. How about if you punch and kick yourself instead?”
Toranosuke didn’t know what to say. His eyes shot wide.
The girl who offered the suggestion, Yuki—a fellow member of his group—was not being snide or sarcastic. It sounded as though she was giving a very straightforward opinion.
And then the room erupted.
The class burst into cheers. “Yeah! Yeah!” Sota was stunned. Toranosuke looked to the blackboard, mouth agape. Sota glanced at Niko. Things had gotten weird after he showed up. Sota expected Niko to look smug and pleased with the influence he wielded, yet what he actually saw caused him to gasp.
Niko was totally expressionless. He observed the scene quietly.
The class was in a swell of excitement all around him, but he stood placidly, as though uninvolved. He was totally disinterested.
The kids wrote on the blackboard, If you get angry, punch your own head.
They treated this very seriously.
It was at that point that an old paragraph popped into Sota’s head.
“People who pick on their friends are evil. I’ve heard that people who stop bullying get targeted by the evil bullies. But I want to be the one who stops the bullying. I want to help my classmates.”
For a moment, he wasn’t sure how he knew the words, but then he remembered they came from Toranosuke’s paper. It was the one that had been so frustrating to listen to because Toranosuke clearly didn’t believe a word of it.
What had brought it to mind now? Sota couldn’t get that paragraph out of his head for whatever reason.
Toranosuke hung his head, and his classmates cheered and shouted all around him. Sota was rooted to the spot.
“I can’t believe it,” his mother said to Rinko’s mom while they were on the way home.
Sota and his mother had finished grocery shopping and run into his classmate Rinko’s mom on the way back. While the two women stood and chatted, Sota pretended to play in the nearby park alone, all the while actually listening to the conversation.
“I can’t believe it. Did you know that the Nakaos are actually really close to Niko’s mom now? I was shocked when I heard.”
Nakao was Toranosuke’s last name. They were talking about his parents.
“That’s right. I saw them together, but I didn’t know it was Niko’s mother. I didn’t even realize she was someone’s parent at first. She seems, I don’t know, a little too old? Like a grandma, or a housekeeper. But then Niko followed her. What a shock it was to realize she’s his mother.”
Toranosuke remembered everything these days. He did his homework, took his classes seriously, and never hit his classmates. But it was all because whenever he snapped and started to swing a fist, the entire class turned to him and shouted, “You’re going to hit your own head!”
Sota heard that phrase many times after the class meeting, and then he didn’t hear it at all. Toranosuke mended his ways and stopped causing problems. He was like a different person altogether. He no longer spoke to anyone in class.
“You know what Mrs. Nakao said to me when we met at the last parents’ meeting?” Sota’s mom whispered. “She said, ‘Since none of you will listen to me, the only people I can rely on anymore are the Kanbaras!’ I was kind of worried. She didn’t seem right.”
“I know what you mean. She’s gotten really thin. When I saw her, she had no makeup on, and her hair was all scraggly. Before, you could tell she was a working woman, because she had everything perfectly in line. Last time I saw her, she wore this dirty apron, and standing next to Niko’s mom, they nearly looked identical. I was like, ‘What happened to you?’ I’m concerned.”
For all their talk about worries, the two moms chatted for a while. To Sota, it sounded as though they enjoyed themselves. Perhaps it was his imagination, but it seemed like they could have gone on even longer.
Orange sunset fell upon the street around them, making the shadows coming from the two women’s feet darker, longer, wavering.
Things felt different in class.
“Hey, Sota. Kana’s been forgetting her things lately. Since you’re in her group, could you help her out?” Niko said to him one day. Sota felt something cold trickle down his back, and he knew why.
Kana was Sota’s seat neighbor and group partner. She hadn’t been doing her homework recently. Her concentration was poor, and she forgot to bring things to school. When Sota had asked her what was wrong, she’d explained that her mother was in the hospital, and she was really busy taking care of her little brother and sister and getting them ready for kindergarten. It kept her up late, meaning she was exhausted in class. Sota didn’t think it was a lie.
For some reason, Sota had found himself thinking, This is bad. He’d recalled the toothless version of Toranosuke after the class defanged him, and the way they’d cheered at that class meeting after berating him.
“Do you want to see mine?” he’d offered, showing Kana his homework. After that, Sota let her copy from him every morning before Niko showed up.
When Sota replied to Niko, his voice came out a bit hoarse. “Kana’s mom is in the hospital. Her brother and sister are too little to take care of themselves, so she has to help.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s only her dad at home, so it’s tough. She has to pitch in around the house and goes to bed really late.”
“I see. I lost my older brother while at my previous school, and that was really challenging.”
Sota almost gasped at that remark. The way Niko spoke of the event with so little inflection and interest was hard to believe. Did lost my brother mean that his brother died? In an accident or at the hospital? Did that have something to do with Niko transferring here?
So many questions popped into Sota’s head, but he didn’t know which, if any, were safe to ask. Instead, he just stared at Niko, who added, “But so what?”
His eyes were as clear as marbles, without a speck of cloudiness in them.
“What does that have to do with failing to finish her homework and forgetting to bring things to school? If Kana’s having trouble, why don’t you go to her house to help her?”
“Help…?”
“Yes, help. I’ll go with you, if you want.”
“Umm…”
“The sticker chart’s coming back, after all.”
“Huh?”
Sota glanced toward the back of the room. There was a new chart where the old flower-circle sticker one had been, fresh and blank.
Sota looked uncertainly at Niko. The other boy said, “It’s such a helpful system for the good of the class. It would be a shame to lose out on it forever.”
His gaze was impossible to read.
And that was when Sota had a major realization.
Despite being named after the word for smile, Niko never actually smiled, as far as Sota could tell.
Unsure of whether to go to Kana’s house—or of what his mom would say if he told her—Sota walked the route back home in an uncertain daze, and he spotted Toranosuke sitting on a park bench along the way.
He was no longer larger than life, as he had been. In fact, he literally appeared smaller now. He was hunched, shoulders drooped, on the bench all alone. Sota couldn’t help but call to him.
“Toranosuke?”
Toranosuke’s reaction was muted. He looked up slowly, his recognition delayed, then scooted over a bit without a word. Sota took that as a sign that he could sit down.
They were both silent for a while.
Sota was unsure what to say, but he felt there was something he ought to ask. “Are Niko and the others still showing up at your house?”
Toranosuke glared at him with baleful eyes. “They’re not,” he said. “They don’t come. They’re probably not worried that I’ll forget anything anymore. My mom’s lonely now that they don’t visit, though.”
“Lonely?”
“She thinks the rest of the class abandoned me, that ignoring me is a form of bullying, and that none of the parents will listen to her problems. Niko doesn’t come, but sometimes his parents do. They say things like, ‘We’re so jealous of you, Mrs. Nakao,’ and, ‘Mrs. Sawatari is nothing compared to you,’ and stuff like that.”
“Sawatari?”
“The mom of the sixth-grade student chairman. She’s the owner or designer or whatever of that huge apartment complex near the school. Hilarious, right?”
Toranosuke laughed. It didn’t sound convincing.