Gym class was divided into boys and girls.
I was sitting on a bench in the shade of a tree on the north side of the field, still in my uniform. I still wasn’t allowed to do vigorous exercise, according to the doctor’s instructions. So, as I’d told Teshigawara, there wasn’t any particular need for me to hurry over.
I was the only boy sitting out of the class.
Everyone wore matching white exercise clothes and ran around the 400-meter track. Despite the balminess of the afternoon sunlight, only ten or so figures moved about on the broad field. A slightly cold sensation went through me, for some reason, as I watched the scene.
When I ran, I liked to do long distances and short distances. I liked using exercise machines and swimming, too. What I didn’t like was soccer, or basketball…basically, I’m terrible at team sports.
I wish I could run, I thought. I tried taking a few deep breaths, and I didn’t feel anything strange in my chest. Which just made me want to join in even more.
And yet, there was a part of me that cringed in terror. That felt as though, if I were to run and jump around recklessly, a hole would immediately open up again somewhere in my lungs.
“You’re not going to have a third one.” That’s what my dad had told me, but that wasn’t nearly convincing enough for me to take seriously. If I was stupid and pushed myself too far, I would have to go through all those horrible feelings again, and I was done with that. What I had to do now was take it easy for a while. That was my only option.
The girls were doing long jumps in a sandlot on the western side of the field.
I thought I would see her among them—Mei Misaki. I squinted my eyes to look, but they were pretty far away and I couldn’t really make anyone out.
Considering she had an eye patch over her left eye, maybe she was sitting out. In which case, she’d be on one of the benches nearby…
I spotted a person who might have been her.
Standing all alone a short distance from the sandlot in the shade of a tree, wearing a uniform—was that her?
Because of the distance, I couldn’t tell if it was Mei or not.
And I couldn’t exactly stare at the girls all class long. A sigh escaped me as I laced my fingers behind my head and reclined into them. I squeezed my eyes shut and, all at once, I heard the shrill voice of Ray the mynah bird asking “Why?” ringing in my ears.
I guess it was about five or six minutes after that.
“Um, Sakakibara?”
Someone was talking to me.
Surprised, my eyes opened. Just three feet away, I saw a girl in a navy blazer.
It wasn’t Mei Misaki, though.
She wore not an eye patch, but silver-rimmed glasses. Her hair was cut not in a short bob, but grew to her shoulders. It was Yukari Sakuragi, the class representative.
“Are you sitting out of gym for now?”
Taking care that she wouldn’t notice the slight disappointment I was feeling inside, I replied, “Yeah. It’s only been a week since I got out of the hospital and all. The doctor told me to hold off on exercising and see how I feel. Are you sitting out, too? Do you feel sick today?”
“I fell yesterday and twisted my leg.”
Yukari Sakuragi dropped her eyes to her leg. That was when I noticed the painful-looking bandage wrapped around her right leg from the top of her knee down to her shin.
“Um…you didn’t happen to fall on the hill outside the back gate, did you?”
I asked it half as a joke. When I said it, Sakuragi smiled, as if letting go of some kind of tension.
“Luckily it happened somewhere else. You already know about that jinx, huh?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
“So then—” she began, but I ignored it and seized the chance to cut in.
“I wanted to thank you for coming to the hospital the other day.”
“Oh…we were happy to do it.”
“Do you want to sit down?”
I stood up, offering the bench to the injured girl. Then I changed the subject.
“Can you tell me why there aren’t two class groups in this gym period?”
I’d been wondering about that for a little while.
“I thought it was normal for a class split up into boys and girls like this to join up with the class next door? Especially in public school? Plus, there are two teachers for the boys and the girls, so with just the one class, there’s half as many students as there should be…”
At least with this few people, we wouldn’t be able to have a soccer game in class. Not that I could care less about that missed opportunity.
“The other classes are different,” Sakuragi answered. “Class 1 and Class 2 have gym together, and Class 4 and Class 5 have gym together. Class 3 is the only one by itself.”
“Why Class 3?”
I could understand since there were an odd number of classes in third year, but then why was Class 3 the one by itself? Wouldn’t Class 5 usually be the odd one out?
“You were with Kazami and Teshigawara during lunch, right?”
This time, she was the one to change the subject.
“Yeah, I was. What about it?”
Still sitting on the bench, she cocked her head and looked up at me. “Well, did they…tell you anything?”
“Kazami and Teshigawara?”
“Yeah.”
“They gave me a quick tour of the school. Basically, hey, that’s Building A, behind that is Building S where the special classes are—like that. They told me the ghost story about the lotus pond, too.”
“That’s all?”
“We went to Building Zero last, so they told me a little about what the old school building’s for.”
“And that’s all?”
“Pretty much, I think, yeah.”
“…Oh.” Yukari Sakuragi bowed her head with a quiet whisper, then lowered her voice even more. “…I have to do this right, or Akazawa’s going to get mad at me…”
I caught only snatches of what she was murmuring to herself. Akazawa? Wasn’t “Akazawa” one of the students who didn’t come to school today?
Sakuragi slowly got up from the bench, wearing a pensive expression. I could clearly see how her movements accommodated the injury to her right leg.
“So, Sakuragi—”
I decided to just try asking her.
“I mean, where’s Misaki?”
“…What?”
She tilted her head to one side.
“The girl in our class, Mei Misaki. You know, with the patch over her left eye. Is she sitting out of gym class, too?”
Sakuragi kept cocking her head and repeating “What? What?” She looked completely baffled, for some reason. Why? What was making her react so bizarrely?
“I ran into her outside Building Zero during lunch.”
Just then, far off in the distance, we heard a deep, reverberating rrrmmmble. Was a plane taking off? No, it didn’t sound like that. Could it be thunder?
I craned my head back to look at the sky.
From what I could see here in the shade of the tree, it was the same, clear May day it had been before. So I thought, but when I scanned around, I saw that ominous clouds were gathering slightly to the north. So it really was thunder from over there that we’d heard?
As the thought occurred to me, the same rmrmbmrmmmble sound came again from far off.
So it is that. Distant spring thunder.
Must be in for a little rain after sunset.
I ventured this prediction to myself, casting my eyes over the northern sky.
“Huh?”
I spotted something in a place I hadn’t expected, and the question slipped out of me.
“What’s someone doing up there?”
Building C, the three-story school building that stood on the north side of the field. There, on the roof—
Someone was standing just inside the railing that circled the roof. Was that—?
It was her. Mei Misaki.
The realization came suddenly. Even though there was no way I could have clearly seen her face, or even her clothes.
And in the next moment I had left Yukari Sakuragi behind, still wearing her perplexed expression, and started running toward Building C.