After a short homeroom period that lasted only ten minutes, Mr. Kubodera kept his place at the lectern and his assistant, Ms. Mikami, left the room. Mr. Kubodera stayed with us because the first-period class was the subject he taught.
Language arts with Mr. Kubodera was a dull class, as I had somehow imagined it would be. He was still using his polite manner of speaking, and he lectured in a way that was easy to process, but there wasn’t much punch in it, I guess, or he hardly modulated his voice at all…Whatever, it was dull.
But of course, I couldn’t be honest and display my boredom. That would make a terrible impression, obviously. On the teacher and probably on the students, too.
Struggling against the drowsiness that had me in its grip, I fixed my eyes on my brand-new textbook.
A short story by a nineteenth-century literary genius, in a somehow lackluster excerpt. As my eyes ran over the text, my mind was half on the Stephen King novel I’d started reading, wondering how everything would turn out, though that was impossible to predict. Man, what was going to happen to Paul Sheldon, the popular author who’d been imprisoned by his loony Number One Fan?
That was Mr. Kubodera’s class. But the classroom was oddly quiet, which wasn’t like the vague image I had drawn in my mind of a “public middle school.” Maybe it had been an unwarranted preconceived bias, but—how should I put it? I imagined the atmosphere would be rowdier.
But it wasn’t as if everyone was being serious and concentrating, either. No one was whispering during the class, but looking around I saw people zoning out and some people whose heads were bobbing and bobbing and maybe falling. There were even people who were surreptitiously reading a magazine or intent on doodling. I didn’t think Mr. Kubodera was the kind of teacher who would scold for every little thing…and yet.
I wonder what it was.
The room’s air held a silence deeper than it needed to be, somehow…No, not silence. Formality, maybe? Formality, and a strange tension…yeah, it felt sort of like that.
What was this?
Could it be? I wondered.
Could the presence of an alien element mixed in today (in other words, a transfer student from Tokyo) be the cause? And that slight tension filling the room…Nah, that kind of thinking is just hyperactive self-consciousness.
…What about that girl?
Mei Misaki.
The thought nagged at me suddenly, and I looked over at her desk.
I saw her there, cheek pressed into her hand as she stared dully out the window. I took the quickest of glances, so I couldn’t tell anything more than that. With the amount of backlighting from the sun, my glimpse of her was, in the end, of a shadow that hardly seemed real.
✦ ✦ ✦
The impression was more or less the same in my other classes from second period on, too. There were slight differences with the subject or the teacher, but—how should I put it?—the thing flowing underneath it all was the same.
A strange silence permeating the entire classroom, a formality, a tension…Yes, it was something like that.
I couldn’t tell anything concrete, couldn’t point to someone acting a certain way. But I definitely felt something like that.
As if someone (or maybe everyone?) was preoccupied by something, for instance. Maybe without even realizing it? That person (those people?) could be thinking about something and not even be aware of it…But no. The possibility that I was just imagining things, imagining all of it, was undeniable. I mean, maybe I would get used to it soon and stop noticing anything.
During a break between classes, a couple of students exchanged a few words with me. Every time they called my name—“Sakakibara!”—even as I privately cringed and prepared myself, I managed to handle it either placidly, amicably, or innocuously, at a basic level. So I thought.
“Are you over whatever it is that put you in the hospital?”
Yeah. Completely over it.
“Which is better, Tokyo or here?”
I dunno. They’re not that different, really.
“Tokyo sure is nice, though. A backwater town like Yomiyama just doesn’t cut it lately, y’know?”
Tokyo is Tokyo. There’s a lot about it that’s not so great. Wherever you go, it’s nothing but people, and the wards are always swarmed. It never settles down…
“I guess you feel like that when you live there.”
I almost think it’s better here because it’s so much quieter. And there’s so much nature here.
When I told them that Yomiyama is better than Tokyo, half of me really felt that way and the other half was trying to convince myself of it.
“So your dad’s a college professor? And he’s in some foreign country for research?”
How did you know that?
“Mr. Kubodera told us. So everyone knows.”
Oh. Did he tell you about the school I used to go to, too?
“We know all about that. It was Ms. Mikami’s idea to send you flowers while you were in the hospital.”
Really?
“Man, I wish Ms. Mikami was in charge of this class instead. She’s gorgeous, and she dresses great, and plus…c’mon, don’t you think so?”
Uh-h-m, I don’t really know.
“C’mon, you’re not…”
You know, my dad’s gonna be in India for a year. Starting this spring.
“India? I bet you it’s even hotter there.”
Yeah, it’s really hot, he said.
In the midst of such conversations, something would nag at me and I would search for Mei Misaki. As it turned out, as soon as a class ended, she would disappear from her seat. But I never spotted her anywhere else inside the classroom, either. Did she just always go outside during the break or something?
“You feeling nervous about something? You keep going all shifty-eyed.”
No…it’s nothing.
“Did those notes I brought you in the hospital help?”
Oh, yeah. They were great.
“You want a quick tour around the school during lunch? You’re gonna have a ton of problems if you don’t know where stuff is.”
The student who made this offer was a boy named Teshigawara. There was a rule that the students wear name tags during school, so I could tell people’s names at a glance without needing introductions. He seemed to be good friends with Tomohiko Kazami, and Teshigawara had come over with him to talk to me.
“Yeah, definitely. Thanks,” I replied, then glanced casually back over at Mei Misaki’s desk. The next class was going to be starting soon, but she still wasn’t there. Although…
It was at this point that I realized a bizarre fact.
Her desk, the farthest seat back in the row next to the windows facing the schoolyard, was the only one unlike all the other desks in the room. It was incredibly old.
✦ ✦ ✦
I blunted my hunger in a quick blitz at lunchtime.
There were a lot of all-boy groups and all-girl groups who pushed their desks together for lunch, but I couldn’t quite work myself up to shoving my way in among them, so I bolted down the lunch my grandmother had given me with the speed of an eating contest.
When I stopped to think about it, I realized this was my first time ever eating a homemade lunch at school. I’d eaten school lunches at my old school, and even when there was some event like a field trip or field day, it had been a foregone conclusion that my lunch would be bought from a convenience store. It was like that all through elementary school, too. Never once had my dad gotten the genius idea that it would be nice to cook something for his motherless son every now and then.
And so it was that my grandmother’s homemade lunch truly touched me.
Thank you, Grandma. It tasted amazing. As always, I was mentally bowing my head over the emptied lunch box, infusing the gesture with my immense gratitude.
Wait a minute. I looked around the room.
Where was Mei Misaki?
How was she spending her lunch?
“Sakakibara!”
A voice called out from behind me without warning.
At the same moment, someone tapped me lightly on the shoulder and I tensed more defensively than I had all that day. For no concrete reason, I had convinced myself, So it’s finally happening? and I turned around ready for it, but…
Teshigawara was standing there. Kazami was beside him. And there was no discernible malice on their faces. Late though I was to realize it, I couldn’t help feeling exasperated at my oversensitivity.
“Like we promised,” Teshigawara said. “The tour of the school.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
My true feelings on the matter, kind of cynically, were that they didn’t need to go to all the trouble of giving me a tour. I could just ask where something was whenever I needed to get there. But, okay, I couldn’t insult the kindness of my new classmates. This is the time to keep a lid on it and not act like a martyr…
The three of us all stood up and left the room belonging to third-year Class 3.