Noticing that he had just said something weird, Azuri stopped cold.
“Fff… ha ha ha ha…” Quite inexplicably, Seigo laughed.
“Seigo-kun,” Azuri asked, “are you perhaps afraid of heights?”
“Whaddaya mean, ‘perhaps’?! I am! Honestly, you shook the carriage because you knew that, didn’t you?” Seigo spoke with a taut expression.
Without a trace of malice, Azuri nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Look…” Seigo was beginning to feel ashamed of himself, being completely toyed with by a fifth grader. But he wasn’t mad at her. He knew this was how she acted, even at school. Azuri was separated from the “circle.”
She didn’t really intend to look down on others. But others had that impression of her anyway. The way she phrased her words made it sound that way. She was awkward. Perhaps it was because she spent a lot of time alone. She had an inability to maintain relationships with people.
Furthermore, she was always more adept at everything than anyone else, which made it seem as if she was “looking down” on others even more.
When Seigo had been Azuri’s age, it had been normal to be respected or receive admiration if one was good at something. But it had served to create distance between people as well.
How could she be used to being alone? If it were me, I’d be miserable, thought Seigo.
To get his mind off the fear of being so high above the ground, Seigo pulled out a tiny sketchbook from his pocket and began drawing with a pencil. He sketched the scene in front of him—outside the window—and the young girl, looking far away.
Normally, a view of this fantastic theme park would be enough to make one sigh, but the added attraction of the snow-covered scenery made it look like a scene from another world.
However, the young girl said not a word, as if she felt nothing. She just continued to stare.
Amidst the silence—the only sound was Seigo’s scribbling—Azuri finally spoke. “You went to an art college didn’t you, Seigo-kun?”
“Well, yeah. But it was more like the fine-arts department at an art college. My major… but I guess you wouldn’t understand even if I told you.”
“Why are you working as an art teacher?” she asked.
“Why, you say… hmm. Well, there are a lot of issues… I wanted to be an artist… But you know… After I graduated from art school, I bummed around, and then my teacher from college asked if I wanted to be a teacher at your school, so that’s why.”
“Why didn’t you become an artist?” Azuri asked relentlessly.
Seigo let out a breath. “It’s not that I didn’t become one—I couldn’t become one.”
Seigo’s hand never stopped drawing while he patiently answered all her questions.
“Well, why didn’t you? You’re so good at pictures, Seigo-kun.”
“You can’t be one just because you’re good. I mean, I guess I don’t have enough talent or passion to become an artist.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just know,” he answered. “I saw it, the difference in talent. That thing called passion. It’s when you’d risk even your life to paint. I don’t have that. When I was in college, I entered what I thought was my best picture into this competition…”
“What kind of picture?”
“Hmm…” he mused. “I guess you could call it a picture of a girl. It was actually pretty deep, y’know, and pretty good considering it was done by someone like me. But the picture that took first prize… It was amazing. It was just a picture, but it felt like it was really emanating light and warmth. I found myself mesmerized by it. This was a rival’s picture, y’know? This dude was just a junior high kid, only fifteen years old! But they said he’s the son of a famous painter who committed everything to painting and died, so I was no match. And I realized it was talent and genes…”
Seigo said this as a joke, but Azuri couldn’t laugh.
“Why—why did you give up?”
“Huh?” Seigo was confused by Azuri’s words.
“Maybe that person,” she explained, “that fifteen-year-old person worked really hard. So that’s why he became number one, right? How can you pass it off as just talent? That’s an insult to him.”
“…Maybe.” He laughed it off, shrugging his shoulders.
That could be true, he thought. But even so, I still don’t stand a chance. After all, working hard like that is also a talent, right?
He thought this but didn’t say it aloud. Saying it aloud wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t change the fact that Seigo was where he was.
“But it’s okay. For me. I kind of like my job right now. And I like kids. And Azuri, I like you, too.”
Seigo smiled innocently. He hadn’t meant anything in particular by those words, but they still had meaning. Azuri’s cheeks reddened just a little bit. A touch of peach tinged her white skin.
This was the first time since she had lost her parents that Seigo had seen her expression change. For the longest time she had worn an expressionless face, like a doll, her heart frozen shut.
To begin with, she had never expressed her feelings much, but since her parents’ death, that trait had become even more noticeable. It was as if she were doing it intentionally. And Seigo had been thinking seriously, from the bottom of his heart, about what he could do for her.
He didn’t want it to be just kind words either, or just plain sympathy—he genuinely wanted to do something for her as a human being. But he knew he wasn’t a special kind of person. To begin with, he didn’t know of any special words he could say to comfort her. So today, although it was entirely a coincidence, had turned out to be a good opportunity. He was close to her, if only for a little bit. He wanted to see her smile, even if it might be too greedy a wish to ask for.