We turned off onto a side street and climbed a steep hill. At the top, we found the park.
“Wow, nothing has changed at all!” Ai exclaimed excitedly once we’d reached it. Her gaze danced from side to side.
She was right; not a thing had changed about the park in two years. I hadn’t been there once since we broke up, but it looked exactly the same as in my memory.
“The elephant slide is still there!”
“Yeah.”
Ai pointed toward a slide in the shape of a pink elephant. The paint was peeling here and there, and a few spots were rusting. It was the place we had sat together at both the beginning and the end of our relationship.
I felt an overwhelming pressure in my chest as I followed Ai, who cheerfully ran over to the slide.
A staircase with no railing was carved into the elephant’s back. Ai climbed it easily and smiled down at me from the top of the slide. “Brings back memories, doesn’t it?”
“…Yeah.”
She looked unbelievably relaxed in this place so intimately connected to our past. Meanwhile, that same past weighed me down and I couldn’t muster a smile.
“This park is so big and has so much playground equipment, but no one’s ever here. Even though there’s a school nearby.”
“It’s not that close. You’d have to walk twenty minutes from the school to get here. Plus, it’s up a huge hill.”
“A twenty-minute walk isn’t that bad. I was just thinking how kids these days don’t really play at parks anymore.”
“Aren’t we ‘kids these days’?”
All of a sudden Ai was talking like an old lady, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
She looked at me, eyes wide, pointed, and smiled. “Ah! You finally laughed! That’s the first time you’ve smiled all day, Yuzuru.”
“Really?”
Come to think of it, she was probably right. This whole time I’d just been watching her smile, thinking about old times.
“Yeah! You have a great smile, Yuzuru,” she said with a nod, then slid down the slide. I quickly averted my gaze when I saw her skirt was pushed up slightly over her thighs.
“Every time I come to this park…,” she said after reaching the bottom of the slide, “I just feel so free.”
Her gaze seemed far-off. She must have been thinking about that time two years ago, too.
“…You’re always free, Ai,” I replied.
She smiled a little strangely. “You think so?”
“That’s how it looks to me.”
“Oh. Hmm, okay…” She nodded a few times in her usual noncommittal way. “I guess I just live my life…doing whatever I want to do,” she murmured.
I nodded. “I know.”
That had made her stand out in a bad way back in junior high. I had known about her even before we became friends, through rumors.
She was the prettiest girl in our grade, but her behavior was so erratic that she would disrupt group activities. Because of that, everyone assumed she was hopelessly self-absorbed. Those were the rumors I’d heard—both negative and positive, but mostly negative.
“But you know, living that way just looks like being selfish to other people.” She narrowed her eyes as she spoke. “Everyone lives within this vast set of constraints, following all these rules so that they don’t invade other people’s territory. They’re living their lives walking on eggshells, careful not to cause trouble or to make others dislike them. They live according to all these unspoken rules.”
Ai, normally so relaxed, suddenly began to wax philosophical, and I looked on, eyes wide, unable to speak.
“But I’m different,” she continued. “I neglect all that stuff in order to protect my own philosophy. I live selfishly.”
“That’s one of your strengths, though,” I said.
She giggled and nodded. “Yeah, thanks. I love that you think that about me.”
My heart skipped a beat when she said the word “love” again.
Meanwhile, Ai continued, as if she were sorting through her feelings out loud. “But other people are different. They look at me like I’m disgusting. No matter how freely I try to live my life, I won’t be able to escape the way they look at me.”
She smiled faintly as she spoke, though the topic seemed almost too heavy for such an expression.
Thinking back to our days in junior high, I remembered how she never seemed to get along with other girls.
As for the guys, they’d put up with almost anything, saying, “Yeah, but Mizuno’s cute.” And even if she did cause trouble for them, they’d brush it off with a smile and say, “Well, that’s just how she is…” They overlooked her behavior because of her physical beauty and because they knew she didn’t mean any harm.
But the girls were different. The way the guys let Ai get away with everything upset them. I’d seen them complaining about her several times, saying, “Just because she’s pretty, she thinks she can do anything she wants.”
Ai always seemed to laugh it off, but apparently, it had bothered her.
“I thought I had to give up on making friends,” she said, “that I didn’t need anyone who understood me. I didn’t care what other people thought as long as I could live my life the way I’d chosen.”
I couldn’t say anything.
I had no idea Ai felt that way back when we were just junior high school kids. After all, we still weren’t fully in control of our emotions back then. I just thought she was a free spirit who did as she pleased.
She looked up at me, and her round eyes met mine.
“But then I met you, Yuzuru.”
My body trembled when she said my name all of a sudden.
“You didn’t look at me like everyone else did.” She stared at me as she spoke. “Do you remember the day we first met?”
“…Vaguely.”
“What? Only vaguely? I could never forget it,” she said with a giggle.
To be honest, I remembered it vividly. I couldn’t forget it, either.
After school one day, she had suddenly appeared in the classroom and caught my eye.
“You were holding a vase the first time we met.”
“…That’s right.”
At Ai’s words, my mind slowly drifted back to that day.
I was alone in the classroom, on cleanup duty.
It was approaching autumn, and the school had grown chilly. The sun setting in the western sky out the window looked somehow clear and crisp and made me forget the muggy heat of the summer.
I finished erasing the chalkboard and sprayed cleaner on it. I quite enjoyed those kinds of simple, repeated tasks.
Once I’d finished wiping down the chalkboard, I started writing the names of whoever was on cleanup duty tomorrow in the bottom right-hand corner.
I snorted as I wrote the names “Ashida” and “Andou” on the board. They were both slackers. I was sure they’d each try to make the other do everything, and it would start a rock-paper-scissors match, just like what had happened to me that day.
I’d lost, and that’s why I was cleaning alone.
The chores were over in a flash if you had someone else to help, but even if you had to do them alone, it wasn’t that big a deal.
I was slowly finishing up when all of a sudden I saw a butterfly flying around inside the classroom. It flapped its wings and flew toward the wall, landing there.
“……”
It seemed like the butterfly was in trouble. It had probably wandered in through an open window after school and was now stuck inside since I’d closed them all.
“I opened the window for you. Look, it’s over there.”
I tried shooing the butterfly toward an open window with a broom from the cleaning closet. I wanted to guide it outside, but it just kept avoiding the broom handle and wouldn’t go where I wanted it to.
I suppose from the butterfly’s perspective, it seemed like some giant human was attacking it.
“…Hmm.”
I leaned the broom against the wall and looked around the classroom. Then, on the windowsill, I spotted a clear vase. The students in charge of the class plants hadn’t changed the water frequently enough, and the flowers inside had dried out in no time. I carefully removed the dead plant matter and then picked up the vase.