It had happened before Rukana turned three years old, and yet she still remembered it clearly. Her father had bought her a picture book meant to teach children the basic phonetic characters of the Japanese writing system, and her mother had caught her copying characters from that book into a notebook by hand. Her mother’s eyes had widened, and she had let out an astonished shout.
“Rukana! You can write?!”
“I can,” Rukana had replied.
She’d opened up her notebook to show her mother a page full of writing, and her mother had been so pleased, she had given Rukana a round of applause. “Incredible! You’re a genius!” Rukana never forgot how proud her mother looked that day.
That same year, on her father’s birthday, Rukana gave him a card she’d made from construction paper. It said, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DADDY,” in English. Her father couldn’t believe his eyes.
“You didn’t really write this, did you, Rukana? That can’t be possible,” her father had said. Rukana responded by opening up her notebook and writing the same sentence once again, this time while her father watched. Her father lifted her up high into the air, shouting with glee. “That’s amazing! You’re a genius, Rukana!” Rukana remembered looking down at him and seeing how his glasses were slightly clouded.
When Rukana was in preschool, she’d badger her mother into taking her to a big bookstore every Sunday. She would refuse to leave the store until she’d read two books and chosen a third to buy. By the time she was finishing preschool, she was reading books intended for kids in upper elementary school. When she encountered vocabulary she didn’t already know, she’d look the word up in a dictionary and practice writing it until she had it memorized—though in Rukana’s case, that only took three or four repetitions.
Both of Rukana’s parents had poor eyesight. Her father wore glasses and her mother contact lenses. Rukana herself had taken an eye exam in elementary school and been told she was nearsighted. Her facial features looked like a blend of her parents’, and she had her father’s build. But in the summer of her second year in elementary school, she came to realize that aside from that, she had very little in common with her mother and father.
Neither of her parents had very good concentration. They were both unambitious and quick to give up. They fought over the pettiest, most trivial issues, made up, then started fighting again soon afterward. They never learned from their experiences—always repeating the same mistakes, time after time.
Rukana’s parents weren’t unusually dull people, of course. Rukana had already realized, as a second grader, that they were perfectly average. Most people were the same. She had no choice but to live in a world full of people like her parents. Though of course, she never let it show that she considered most people to be idiots.
Once, when Rukana was nearing the end of her time in preschool, a rather large boy named Masaki Kamishiro had forced her to climb to the top of a jungle gym, then demanded she jump off. “This is what you get for being such a brat!” he shouted. Rukana still remembered the look on his sunburned face as he roared at her.
Another child Rukana’s age, Kokoho Yuzawa, used to pull on Rukana’s hair whenever she had the chance. She pulled so strongly, Rukana would cry from the pain. Their preschool teacher scolded Yuzawa, but she would always claim she was just teasing Rukana and pout her way out of trouble. Rukana knew she was lying. Her actions were clearly malicious.
Kamishiro and Yuzawa weren’t the only ones who did such things. Plenty of kids had decided they didn’t like Rukana and had caused her harm over the years. Rukana had never understood why. Yes, she looked down on those she considered her inferiors, but she never hit them. She never kicked them. She never even went out of her way to insult them. So why did they dislike her? What was it that kids like Kamishiro and Yuzawa hated so much about her?
Looking back, Rukana had a theory: People like Kamishiro and Yuzawa resented her because she was exceptional. That was all it took. As the saying went, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, and some people considered hammering down such nails their personal mission. No matter how much they hammered, their own nail would never stick out, yet they hammered away regardless. If someone was running in front of them, they’d do everything they could to trip them. It wouldn’t make them run any faster, but they’d do it anyway.
“So I decided to pretend that I wasn’t special,” said Rukana. There, in that house that smelled of expired soy sauce, Rukana poured her heart out to Itoha. She revealed secrets she’d kept hidden away for years and years. “Having a bunch of miserable idiots take their jealousy out on you is awful, right? The only advantage they have is how many of them there are and how quickly they form cliques. They instinctually understand that there’s strength in numbers and that might makes right. An army’s an army, even if it’s an army of idiots—one person will never stand a chance against them. Better to keep your head down and work around them.”
“…I just can’t do that,” said Itoha.
“That’s fine,” Rukana replied. “After all, you have me, right?”
Itoha’s hole-like eyes overflowed with tears. She trembled from head to toe, and her features twitched dramatically with every sob. Her face was utterly unsightly, and no matter how much time passed, Rukana could still remember it down to the tiniest detail.