“Oh yeah?” She obviously couldn’t care less. “Okay.” “Huh?” “Talk.” I could only laugh nervously. She was so ready to be done with me and send me back out the door. “Let’s talk at the beach! Sand and school uniforms are a match made in heaven!” Was that why Ms. Chitaira had invited me over? To leer at me in my outfit at the beach? “A walk on the beach? I’m coming, too!” “Huh?” At first, I didn’t recognize Umi’s cheerful, high-pitched voice. She scuttled over to her sister, her feet in pretty sandals. Her toenails were also painted like M&M’s. It was garish. Ms. Chitaira caught her little sister in her arms and smiled. “Great! We’ll all go!” “Does it have to be all of us?” Umi whined in the most beautiful voice. “Are you really coming with us?” She joined her hand with her sister’s as if they always walked holding hands now. The look from Umi—no, from this flower-scented girl—was filled with hostility. Good to know she was still as morbidly in love with her sister as before. Rather than be put off, I found myself reassured by the consistency of her obsession. “Yes, I’m coming with you.” Honestly, I wanted to go back. Not back home, but back in time. I’d come all the way just to regret it. If only I could run away from that mistake. Leave it behind me in the dust. The beach was a busy place, with bistros attracting customers and many feet kicking up sand into the air, which stuck to the skin unpleasantly, canceling out any enjoyment of the fine weather and refreshing breeze. Ms. Chitaira took us away from the forest of beach parasols over beach mats, leading us to the breakwater, where she sat down. I limply followed suit, already exhausted by being exposed to strong sunshine reflected both by the waves and the beach sand. “Umi, could I ask you to go for a stroll while I talk to Takasora?” “What? I don’t wanna,” Umi replied without beating around the bush. “Not leaving you alone with a girl in a school uniform.” “Ha-ha-ha! Zero trust, as usual.” “You talk. I won’t listen.” She sat down in between Ms. Chitaira’s legs, hunching over and plugging her ears. After getting in that position, she grinned…grinned? Huh? She was smiling up at her sister so innocently, the scene wasn’t making sense to me. “So stubborn.” With an air of mischief, Ms. Chitaira covered Umi’s eyes with her hands. Umi smiled blissfully at her touch. Seriously, I didn’t recognize her. “Don’t take too long,” said Umi. “Don’t worry,” Ms. Chitaira replied. I wondered if Umi could actually hear everything even with her ears plugged. The wicked woman smiled with pride, as if showing off how well-trained her little sister was. I’d had enough. “Sorry, but can I just go home now?” “Oh, but you’ve come such a long way… Not to say I don’t understand your feelings, Takasora.” She played with Umi’s short hair, tickling her. Umi wriggled, enjoying the touch. “Oh, you do? Really?” Of course she did. She did, and she took pleasure in stomping all over me. “With her new look, Umi isn’t your type anymore, is she?” “You think that’s what’s been on my mind?” Actually…I kind of liked girls in shorts, but I wasn’t going to discuss my preferences with this woman. “I wanted to apologize to you once more,” she told me. “For what this time?” I could think of a number of things. “For taking your Umi from you.” “……It’s fine.” I almost added, “Everyone’s feelings are important,” like an elderly matchmaker making excuses to a client, but I meant it. Umi didn’t love me. She’d fallen in love with this evil woman. Ms. Chitaira hadn’t stolen her from me at all. Umi had happily gotten to be with the person she wanted, and it’d be perfectly wholesome if not for the fact they were sisters…although I couldn’t say what exactly was wrong with it. I couldn’t put a name to where that sense was coming from. “I thought Umi might choose to leave me after learning we were sisters, but to my surprise, that didn’t even occur to her. As for me, being sisters didn’t really make a difference. Not a negative one, at least.” “It made a positive one, then?” “Oh-ho-ho-ho… So anyway, that’s all I wanted to tell you.” “Really? Well, it wasn’t much.” She could’ve just said this over the phone. “I suppose my primary motive was to see you in your school uniform.” “…Save your kink for your little sister.” I wasn’t wearing my uniform to satisfy Ms. Chitaira, but considering the effect it had on her… “Oh, we do plenty of that kink, of course.” I didn’t need to know that. She made me imagine Umi in her uniform, sprawled out on this woman’s bed, and I felt sick. They say beautiful natural scenery brings joy, but there I was on a sunny beach with storm clouds in my heart. You have to marvel at the strength of human emotions. I also had something I wanted to talk about with Ms. Chitaira. Just one thing. “Did you know Umi wants to kill herself after graduating?” “Yes, she told me.” Ms. Chitaira was calmly gazing far at the sea. “Then get it out of her head,” I said sharply. “I’m working on it,” Ms. Chitaira replied with a smile. “She’s changed quite a bit, wouldn’t you say?” “That’s one way to put it…” She’d been pretty much remolded into a completely different form. “I reasoned that completely changing her worldview was in order.” Oh, were the revealing clothes and colorful nails part of Ms. Chitaira’s plan to stop her little sister from committing suicide and not another kink? I couldn’t tell if this woman was serious, but I could tell she was staring very intently at my school uniform. “…What?” She kept her eyes on me, slowly moving her hand toward my skirt, but she didn’t get to lift it up. I wasn’t the one who stopped her, but Umi. She slapped her sister’s hand away from me, her lips tightening into a surly pout. “Sis!” “Yes, dear?” “Don’t make me angry.” “Aren’t you already angry?” “I am.” Umi stood up, taking her fingers out of her ears, scowling like a toddler. “You’re finished talking, aren’t you?” Without her accent, she sounded colder, somehow. “We are. Now it’s your turn to talk to Takasora—” “I’ve got nothing to talk to her about.” “Yeah, great, so I’ll be going.” Umi had changed too much. She didn’t even want to look at me. Her constant smiles, innocent voice, and dumb cheerful energy made her completely alien to me. The Umi Mizuike I’d come to see must have gotten lost after getting on the train to reunite with her sister. “Oh, temper, temper! You girls really should talk.” The devious woman put her hand on my shoulder and forced me to sit down again. Then she made Umi sit next to me while she jumped down from the breakwater onto the beach. “I’ll wait here while you chat.” She smiled at us, plugging her ears as Umi had earlier. Umi flashed a smile as big as hers, showing her white teeth, and waved at her sister like a fan waving at their fave. These exaggerated interactions made me feel as if my skin were drying up. When Umi sat back down next to me, I couldn’t help noticing that even her sitting posture was different now. Instead of hunching, she had her back straight, feet together. Someone had taught her how to sit properly like a lady. I wondered how much work Ms. Chitaira had had to put into correcting her little sister’s habits. I supposed this transformation was necessary. It might’ve been too late to help Umi Mizuike without overwriting her entire image and personality. Unfortunately for me, it also meant she was no longer the person I’d come to meet. What should I do? I’d prepared what I would say to her, but finding her so different, I suddenly wanted to convey a message opposite to what I had intended. Should I go with what I had originally wanted to say or not? “So you had something to say to me?” Not to you, I wanted to tell her. I was strongly put off even by that new inflection in her voice. She was a stranger to me. I wanted to go back. “I don’t want you to die,” I finally said. A malicious voice in my head asked me whether I still really thought so, and I almost started crying when I realized I wasn’t so sure. I should’ve said it to Umi way earlier, during that train ride home. That had been the right time, but I hadn’t been ready. I’d been too inexperienced to deal with the situation. “Sis said that, too.” If only she’d shut up about her sister. I was talking to her now; this was our conversation. I didn’t want her sister brought into it. Tears welled up in my eyes, but the scorching heat made them evaporate before they had the chance to roll down my cheeks. “She really has a weakness for school uniforms, though,” Umi moaned, and she reminded me of a girl complaining to her school friend about something pathetically minor. “I’m experimenting with some new things, though.” She looked almost smug as she said it, her eyes bright and determined. “So she’ll stop only loving high school girls.” “…Good luck, I guess.” “For example, Sis likes it when I play mommy to her.” “………………” …………………………Uh. “What.” “It’s because she’s so starved for motherly love. Her real mother left her, remember?” What Ms. Chitaira critically lacked wasn’t a mother, but sanity. “She gets so sweet when I cuddle her in my arms like a baby. She calls me ‘mommy.’ It gives me this tingling feeling on my back. I guess you call it…ecstasy? I melt inside when she’s acting like she’s entirely dependent on me—” “I don’t want to hear about that.” I stopped her, suddenly afraid of what she had to say. I jumped to my feet to get away from this adorable monster staring at me with round eyes, not understanding why I didn’t want to listen to her lovely story about what she got up to with her sister. Why had it taken me so long to realize she was a lost cause? Everything about her except her looks was broken beyond repair. I looked around at the scenery, which was perfect for a final good-bye. For that subtle change in expression that brings out those bittersweet feelings. Waves murmuring in the background, the sky a beautiful blue, summer at its most vivid as it reaches the end. We had covered all the bases—summer, school uniform, first love, summer break, sudden encounter, friendship, crush—but the movie that’d played wasn’t the melodramatic high school love story I’d expected. It had been ruined by the main character boasting about her mommy role-play with her older sister. I’d lost. I’d been totally defeated. Something broke inside me, and it was destroyed so completely it could never be rebuilt. I didn’t care anymore. “I’m going home.” I’d come to see the wrong person. Having zero sense of direction, I’d strayed too far down the wrong path. That was my own fault. “Will you come again?” Umi asked instead of saying bye. I didn’t even pause to think about whether she wanted to see me again or if it was the opposite. It no longer mattered to me what she thought. I slowly looked her up and down. She was my first love, but she’d become a stranger. I nodded firmly, overcome with the nihilistic desire for one of us—me, Umi, or her older sister—to just die already. “Are you stupid? Not in a million years.” Walking in the heat outside was like being immersed in warm water. I forced myself not to look away from the shimmering ocean despite the glare, but it got pretty bad. At some point, I was half blinded, but I still kept moving one foot in front of the other until suddenly I was on the train, traveling back to a very different square of the patchwork of reality. I felt as if I were dreaming while awake, and my stomach churned. When had I started sleepwalking this summer? Time passed quickly even as I kept my eyes open. I was hurt… Or was I? I couldn’t tell if there really was a wound in my heart or how deep it was. Maybe it was so big, the only way to cope for me was to temporarily lose all sensation. Anyway, I was on the train. I had made my way to the station in a daze, and the train was taking me away. Maybe you could go through life like this, letting things just happen without your conscious participation. I felt like such a fool for all the time I’d spent agonizing, all the effort invested, the way I’d turned my life upside down with nothing to show for it. In hindsight, it was worse to lose trying than to lose without doing anything. Why did she have to come to my house? Couldn’t it have been somewhere else? I wished I’d never met her. I didn’t remember hearing the name of my station being announced, but I stood up when the train stopped, and my joints were so leaden that each step felt like wading through a river. Whenever I tried to think, warm water would trickle into my head. I couldn’t wring it all out. My thoughts became too soggy to hold shape. Outside, I recognized my surroundings. I had gotten off at the right stop, seemingly subconsciously. Still feeling dazed, I moved my heavy limbs to steer my body through the ticket gates, down the stairs, and on the road home. I found that extreme reluctance to do something made dying as an alternative seem less unattractive. I was just so tired from giving everything I had just to hit a wall. I didn’t have any more energy to go on. If something came flying right at my head now, and I knew it’d kill me, I would make no effort to dodge it. My future looked like an endless copy of the same unappealing reality. Who’d said there was no point in having a future if it was going to be just the same as the past? I’d hit rock bottom, and from down there, there was no view toward anything I could aim for. Ever since I’d met that girl, rock bottom had become a familiar place. She was the worst curse. Pathetically, if I ran into her in the street, I’d probably foolishly gravitate to her just as before. Which was why I strongly wished never to see her again. “Stupid,” I spat, insulting her, the memory of that last look on her face already fading. “Stupid, stupid, stupid! Goddamn idiot! So fucking stupid!” “Oh, hello!” My footsteps sounded stiff. The hardened feelings inside me had flowed down into my feet, weighing them down. I barely registered that I was walking, but my body was moving forward, and I wasn’t quite sure why. “Hello!” someone shouted again, and it was only then I realized they were talking to me. That reminded me of another time when I’d been surprised someone had called out to me in the street, back toward the start of summer. Here at the end of summer, I turned around to look at the beginning. “Ah, it’s you…” It was a girl I knew from junior high school basketball club. She was a year younger than me, and she had gone to a different high school. She wore her hair, dyed blond, in a ponytail. Not to be gatekeeping blond hair, but I thought blond didn’t suit her. “You don’t look so good,” she said bluntly. I definitely wasn’t a pretty sight, but I didn’t want to think about it. At least looking sad wasn’t as bad as full-on crying, although maybe I had been and the girl didn’t want to make it worse by pointing it out. I was sure I’d cried at some point on the way home. “It’s just the heat,” I lied. The girl laughed casually, buying my excuse. In junior high, she’d made more of a cold, uncaring impression, but she seemed to have mellowed out a bit. I still got the sense she was only poorly hiding a general lack of interest in other people, though. “Why are you wearing your uniform?” she asked me. “Huh? Um…” I reflexively touched the edge of my scarf, thinking about how to explain it, but in the end, I couldn’t be bothered coming up with anything elaborate. “I just felt like it.” After the fact, all the perfectly plausible excuses came to me—that I’d gone to some school activity or club that day, for example. Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier? I wondered what face the girl would make if I told her I was in my school uniform because a certain perverted woman had asked me to put it on. Maybe she’d just say “Really?” and laugh it off without much interest. “I get it. Some days are like that.” “You have those days, too?” “Er, no, not really.” We both laughed in a shallow, put-on way. I noticed the girl didn’t have a bag or anything with her. I wouldn’t call it a nice day for a walk, but she was a bit weird, so maybe she didn’t have enough to do on her summer break and was taking a walk anyway. I wasn’t in a rush to go anywhere, either, but I wasn’t enjoying a leisurely day—what I felt was not freedom but emptiness. And after getting back home, there’d be plenty for me to do. Thinking about it made the back of my neck feel so heavy, it might break. I thought of Umi, the ocean girl. If I somehow saw her again, I’d take a dive and never swim back up to the surface again. “…Want to go somewhere for tea?” “What, me?” Who else was there? Was she really so shocked she had to stare at me wide eyed, toying with her hair? I had only invited her because it would mean I didn’t have to go back home yet. If she didn’t want to hang out with me, I wanted her to hurry up and say it. I wouldn’t press her; I’d just keep on sleepwalking back to my place. “Hmm… Yeah, okay.” She probably didn’t have anything else to do anyway, but I bet a couple years back, she would’ve flatly refused. We’d never been close friends, but after so long being out of touch, she was almost a stranger to me. She seemed softer, as if the sharp edges of her character had been smoothed out. Dealing with other people would be smoother for her now, I was sure, but I kind of missed her unapproachable vibe. There was an air-conditioned café near the station, so we walked a short way back to it. The café floor was a long rectangle, with most tables taken as the business was good during summer break. When we smelled the freshly baked goods on offer, we couldn’t resist buying some. My ex-basketball club friend ordered tea with milk. I stared at the menu board for a while, eventually going with apple juice. Not for any particular reason. I just wanted something sweet. We sat down next to each other. I looked out the window at the street, where cars of all colors were passing each other by, going in opposite directions. On the other side of the road were tall buildings, both old and new. A group of students in PE outfits were waiting outside. The buildings were so close together, they blocked the view, but it wasn’t like I’d catch sight of blue-green here anyway—the ocean was too far away. “You like school?” I asked like a parent. It was the first summer break since starting high school for my friend. She tucked her hair behind her ear to stop it fluttering in the AC blowing right on her. “No, not really.” “Ah.” What an empty conversation. Was this what I wanted, to talk about nothing with a girl I didn’t know well at a café? If I didn’t feel like going home, I could’ve just walked around town. No need to waste this girl’s time as well. Whenever I saw her, I never got the feeling we’d make hanging out together a regular thing, but I didn’t want to just bore her to death. Except that at that moment, I was too empty inside to properly engage with another person. “I don’t enjoy anything about school, either.” “Um… Well, that’s like you.” The pause told me she’d been at a loss at first on how to continue the conversation. Come to think of it, what did I enjoy? Not school. Not housework, either. But besides those two, I didn’t have anything else to occupy my time. Maybe I hadn’t yet discovered what was fun for me. I used to look down on Umi for being so ignorant, but I was ignorant, too. The woman who did nothing but what she enjoyed was always smiling. Was she happy because finding what she liked came to her with such ease, or did it come to her with ease because she was always happy? Meanwhile, Umi caused me to feel a range of emotions that I couldn’t quite explain. She frustrated me. She annoyed me. Those two emotions were easy to define, but then there were so many others all mixed together. I couldn’t make out what they were. Anyway, that chapter was closed. All I’d learned from it was that first love could feel like scratching yourself until the meat started coming off the bone. “I envy you. Being a natural blond,” my friend said, sandwiching a bite-size comment in between sips of tea. We were both blonds now, but her shade was quite different from mine. I’d always had blond hair, but she hadn’t, so her new look was very fresh to me. “Why’d you make the change?” I gave her hair a closer look. It was bleached almost white. It used to be brown, looking quite pretty when the last rays of sunshine fell on it during basketball practice in the evenings at the school gym. “Well… I was hoping for that ‘new hair, new me’ effect.” She pinched a strand of her hair. “And? Did it work?” “The only new thing was my family complaining about it. They say blond doesn’t suit me.” “Aw.” I drank my juice, not really invested in this conversation. The sweat had dried from my neck, and I was almost feeling too cold. I was getting chilled and heated, chilled and heated, depending on whether I was inside or outside. I was noticing the transitions with a delay, buried too deep under other people’s affairs to feel what was happening to me in real time. Even when I spoke, I didn’t feel like it was me speaking—I simply heard my voice emerge from my body. “I went to see the ocean.” I said it so quietly my friend probably had to wonder if I was talking to her or to myself. The ocean. Umi. Suddenly, the tops of my shoulders were hot again, my skin tingling. The dying embers of my love sending out a last spray of sparks. “Um, you mean, like, today?” “Yeah,” I confirmed, glad my friend had managed to make sense of my random statement. “It was pretty far away.” “Huh, I guess it is a ways away. Our prefecture is landlocked.” She smiled faintly. She was right—the ocean was beyond the borders of our prefecture, just like Umi was beyond the borders of my world. I’d been seduced by a wave that had gotten unexpectedly close, and I’d cried tears as salty as seawater. I had let myself get carried away…and then summer had ended. “What did you do at the beach?” “I…just stared at the ocean.” I’d stared at the ocean, at Umi, unable to decide whether I was witnessing beauty or something blindingly lurid. Umi was as changeable as her namesake, but no matter which way the wind blew, I could never get close to her. “Say… What would you do if a…let’s say, a friend, told you they were going to die in a year?” I tried to make it sound like just a hypothetical question. Myself, I hadn’t managed to do anything. The realization I was in no position to do anything was so painful, it had shattered me, and I was still reeling from shock. But maybe someone else would have come up with the answer I’d never managed to find. I was desperate for a second opinion, even though it wouldn’t change anything anymore. “Imagine it’s not guaranteed to happen…but it’s a possibility.” I think that flustered my friend. She put down her teacup and gazed out the window. I thought she was looking at a little doggy carried by its owner. “If I had a…friend who might die…,” she said, her voice hoarse from emotion. The expression on her face changed to something I’d never seen before—her eyes filled with sorrow, and darkness fell on her face like the moon in shadow. “I’d hate myself, but I’d want to run away.” She let out an awkward laugh, her eyes gleaming as if she was about to cry. I got the impression she was thinking of someone specific, but I didn’t want to press her for details. “Why hate yourself for running away?” I asked, trying to play it cool. “Well…” Maybe it was all in my head, but I thought her expression became sharper again, like when we’d been in junior high. “Is running away not an understandable reaction?” I rephrased. “…If I ran away, they’d follow me. Slowly, on unsteady feet, but they’d follow. Even if they might never catch up to me, they’d keep on walking in my direction… I’d only feel bad for trying to get away.” She was watering it down, her words only skimming the surface. She probably wasn’t aware I could see tears welling up in her eyes, high enough to spill if she shook from a sob. I’d seen her make others cry, but never her crying. …I envied her. She had someone who’d want to follow her, someone who wanted her. She’d been living her life better than I ever could. “I hope someday you won’t feel the need to run anymore,” I said to her. I’d tried to ask her for advice, tiptoeing around the problem on my mind, but in the end, I was the one offering her encouragement. Well, maybe that was for the best. If I helped her in some way, I’d at least have that to my credit. “I hope so…,” she replied quietly, but then she had second thoughts. “No, actually…what I should be hoping for is for that person to not die.” The sadness in her smile told me her wish had slim chances of realization. “Of course,” I agreed nonetheless. Did I want Umi to live, even if we had no connection anymore? Many times, I’d thought I wouldn’t care if she died, but after some introspection, I concluded I would rather she lived than not. My friend and I finished our drinks and left the café. It seemed a natural time to say good-bye. I looked at the girl as she stretched, gazing up at the sky with narrowed eyes, and I racked my brains for her name. At last, I remembered. “Shimamura,” I said, and she turned in surprise. “I hope school gets a bit more fun for you.” I wished her well, even though I’d lost hope for myself. My own life at school was an empty husk I knew I was going to hate crawling back into again. Shimamura smiled at me in the serene way she must have acquired since starting high school. “It’s been a while since someone called me by my surname.”
Chapter 33
24 min read