Right. So! As the thread title indicates, this is, indeed, a one-shot! As such, you can read it and enjoy it completely on its own, and not have to worry about anything else. This is not a story with a steep learning curve.
However! For those readers in a position to care, this story is also intended as a companion piece to Chapter 60 of Developments! The writing is fully my own, but this story was written and developed with a lot of input from Dewelar for consumption alongside his update. There are no Developments spoilers in this story, but trust me, it's an appetizer to that chapter (or a dessert, depending on whether you read it before or after.) This is a general KS fic, but it also provides some insight into the other story (and there are no spoilers, I promise). You should probably read this before that chapter, but I won't tell you how to live your life.
Also! This should really surprise no one, but this story is "parallel continuity" to Mean Time to Breakdown. Meaning, this story takes place in the original Katawa Shoujo timeline, but all the story elements are otherwise identical to their configuration in the MTtB timeline. I know this all sounds very complicated, but if you care about such things, you'll see as you read!
Lastly, I would like to thank forgetmenot for betaing this. Enjoy!
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Bantamweights
On the subway train home, the woman beside me was molested. I turned to look out the window and saw the middle-aged, jowly salaryman behind us discreetly cupping one of her breasts with an almost comically stoic expression. The woman looked like she was about to throw up. Maybe she did after I got off the train.
I felt like I should have done something—maybe I would have done something, if—I don’t know. I should have helped, somehow. Or tried to help.
Then again, it probably wouldn't have mattered. Intentions noble as they might be, I haven't exactly been excelling with the follow-through as of late.
I feel like I might vomit.
One of the overhead fluorescent lights flickers as I tread past, strobing me in a sickly honeydew tone. Toward the exit of Harajuku station, I notice a homeless person sleeping against a pillar, his skin ruddy, his scent sour, and his expression sullen. Were it not still so early in the day, I might suspect him of simply being drunk, but this man has clearly fallen on hard times. I guess I have, too, in a manner of speaking.
As I briskly pass by, I place my other apple atop his belongings. No one pays it any mind. I don’t expect him to appreciate it, though it isn’t like I even care if he’s going to eat it or not. I just couldn’t stand having it, couldn’t bear to look at it. I almost threw it onto the subway tracks. It was a poison apple, in spirit if not in reality.
I don’t even know what I was thinking, bringing them. It’s not as though they don’t serve fruit in hospitals. How was an apple going to fix anything?
It’s rush hour. The escalator out onto the street is almost as crowded as the train was. Along the brick wall I’m ascending past, there’s some vivid, inscrutable advertisement for a new online video game, but it quickly flickers away, its harsh tones going cold and pale as it morphs into some message about life insurance.
I’m sandwiched on my step between an elderly woman and a hooded man in his twenties with earbuds in. I may feel like the stench of overwhelming failure wafts off me like black smoke from a papal conclave, but I’m the only one who seems to notice. It seems wrong, somehow, that the despair I’m feeling isn’t even ostentatious enough to be spectacle. It’s an oily sadness, clinging to every step I take and leaving a trail like a slug.
I feel like I’m stuck in another dimension. Maybe I am.
Golden sunlight and a warm, earthy breeze caress me as I step out onto the sidewalk. The lines of commuters noisily disperse in every direction, like a flicker of confetti. The earbud guy shoves me aside, rushing down the street to make it across before the pedestrian light changes. I probably should have crossed too, but I’ll do it up the next block. It doesn't matter one way or the other.
It’s been cold so far this year, but today the sidewalks are full of people, and the tables in front of the cafés are almost totally occupied. People are working industriously at their laptops, or socializing cheerfully with their friends. It must be the first nice day of spring… No, that’s not even right. It won’t even be spring for almost a week.
So then why does it have to be so nice today? It’s as though even the weather itself wants to make light of my failure.
As I cross another street, trailing behind an old man and a throng of children like a discarded shopping bag caught in the wind, his face crosses my mind, and my stomach once again sinks from the dread and the shame that always follows: I’m here, walking in the sunlight, my skin kissed by a warm, tranquil breeze, while he’s still caged in that room, this beautiful day rushing past him as he breathes in the endlessly recycled air that always reeks of sweat and latex.
Why couldn’t I say anything? I had six weeks and at the end I couldn’t even look him in the eyes. He deserved better than that. He deserved better than me.
While I’m quietly dwelling on the unmitigated disaster this day has been, I start to pass my old junior high school. Despite myself, I casually glance through the windows into the empty, fluorescently-lit hallways I haven’t stepped through in years. For whatever reason, there are still some children milling around, even though they would be on break today.
The school itself is the same as it ever was: tall, glassy and surrounded by trees. It’s a beautiful building—a shame the architecture is a poor façade for the memories made inside of it. I don’t really have many good ones of this place… I wish I hadn’t gone to school here.
I wish I hadn’t been the person I was, here.
I have happier memories of the elementary school, which I walk by only a few blocks up, obfuscated by the brick wall around its perimeter and the tall lines of green pines. Mai and I attended there together, until she moved away the second trimester of third grade. Things were never really the same, after that. My memories of the days that followed are much less clear, and considerably less sweet.
Mai and I stayed in touch for a while…well, I guess one could say that we never really stopped being friends, but things became sparse for a period and when we finally reunited…Mai had changed. She became so comprehensively different, in all the ways that mattered, that it almost felt like a bizarre oversight that she didn't crudely hack her long hair off just to complete the effect.
Over that long period with little contact, she'd begun attending a middle school closer to Yokohama. That’s where, as I’m given to understand, she met and befriended him, and developed a closer friendship with him than I’d ever had with anyone in those days.
He was never around for the few occasions that Mai and I caught up, but he always seemed to appear in her anecdotes. Though I was never given reason to suspect that their friendship was anything but platonic, her enthusiasm about it was such that I felt she’d stopped caring about our own. I always felt like the two of us drifting apart was bound to happen sooner or later…but when entrance exams rolled around, she caught me off guard, as she often does.
Mai began to make a big deal about the two of us potentially attending the same high school, which at first I dismissed as a silly notion. In the end, though, I couldn’t help but find the idea appealing, so we picked a few high schools between us that we agreed we’d apply to together. I was skeptical about her scores, but in the end, we were both fortunate enough to be accepted into a pretty respectable school. It turned out he had been accepted as well, and when that first day of school rolled around, we were all in the same place, for the first time ever. I’m not sure if it was happenstance or destiny.
Speaking of Mai, she’s lighting up my phone with text messages. As I wait for the light to cross another street, I pull my cell out from the pocket of my skirt. There’s a bunch of replies to my last text:
<what do u mean???>
<answer me nako>
<this is fuckin srs answer ur fuckin phone>
Vulgar as always.
<I can’t see him again,> I text back. <It’s killing me. I can’t do it anymore.>
As before, I don’t bother to wait for a response—I can’t face her right now. I can’t have her voice in my ears and admit to her that, in addition to reducing her most valued friendship to a smoldering wreck, I completely gave up on mitigating the damage. I can’t tell her how badly I failed both of them.
This was going to happen sooner or later, Iwanako, he’d said. It really wasn’t your fault.
I’d nodded wordlessly, but in my heart I knew that wasn’t anywhere close to being true. Sure, perhaps he was always going to have that stupid heart condition one way or another, but who said it had to happen like this? Maybe if I’d never dragged him out to those snowy trees, he’d have gotten the diagnosis calmly, after graduation, during a routine physical examination. Maybe they could have operated on him without his ever collapsing in the snow. Maybe then he wouldn’t have given up on life the way he seemed to. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so terrified.
I still have nightmares about that winter day. There are dark circles under my eyes from all the sleep I’ve lost these past few weeks. I’ve been wearing more makeup to conceal how weary I am lately. I know that, now that I’m resolute, the nightmares will be even worse, but it’s not as though I deserve any less. With the way he’s been suffering, it’s only fair that I feel a little bit of it myself.
It isn’t too long before I reach my house. It’s really not that far from the station, and you could spot the ugly thing from a kilometer away. It’s a brand new building atop where my childhood home and the residence next door used to be—I never did find out how my father convinced the Chibas to sell, or how he got the permits so quickly. There’s nothing quite like our new house, though, which looks like nothing so much as a handful of featureless grey geometric shapes in superposition with each other. Construction started on this place immediately after Hikaru moved out, and it’s never exactly felt like home.
The design is ultramodern—more metal and glass than anything else. It’s nice enough to live in, if in a cold way: lots of sharp angles and white walls and metal staircases. There’s plenty of open space and sunlight on the inside, but mother had it furnished so minimalistically, all darkly varnished wood and black leather, that it’s hard to imagine anyone living here, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that I live here. My room is up at the highest point of the house, the top of the central staircase, with a rooftop landing I can walk out on like in school. It’s up there because my mother loves to host gatherings at our home and it’s more convenient for me to be well out of the way of the “adults.”
As I unlock the front door, disarm the security system and trudge my way inside, I note with some relief that she isn’t home—there’s always a one-third chance that she will be at this time of day, and I’m not willing to face her. With her gone, the house is lifeless. Father won’t be home on a weekday and Hikaru is long gone, so this house is a fortress of solitude. My crypt. I’m okay with that, I guess. Lately it certainly feels like I belong in one.
Each footstep I take echoes through the silence as I climb the three dozen steps to my room. My phone is ringing with Mai’s messages again. It’s insufferable. I’ll have to face her eventually, but I don’t have the strength for it right now.
At least their friend Takumi is steering clear of me, but that's likely to change soon. Mrs. Nakai told me in confidence that they’ve begun to consider transferring their son to some kind of special school, and when word gets out about that, Takumi’s opportunism will win out over his loyalty and courtesy, and I’ll no longer be afforded even a moment’s peace from him. In light of that, even I find the notion of transferring out a little appealing, but there’s no point thinking about that now.
In what I’m sure was a bastardization of somebody’s architectural vision, the smooth walls of my own room are painted a pale shade of lavender. This makes it look completely out of place with the rest of the house, but I’d insisted, and nobody comes up here anyway. Lately, though, my room feels so distinct from the other floors that I almost feel more like a tenant than a member of a family. Since Hikaru went to Yokosuka, things here have been so empty and lifeless. That probably has something to do with why I finally confessed, I suppose.
I collapse onto the bed, throwing the delicately set covers into a state of disarray as I pull the duvet over my body. It may be warm outside, but my body is quivering.
He’s probably in bed right now, too—he was when I walked out the door, and they say he’ll be in the hospital for at least a few more months. His chest is still all bandaged up from the surgeries. I imagine it’s going to leave a pretty ugly scar when everything is said and done.
It goes without saying that this has been the worst school holiday, and it doesn't end for another week. What am I even going to do with my time, now that I’ve decided that I’m never going back? I don’t even have the energy to get up off this bed.
I haven’t eaten anything all day. I don’t know yet when I’m going to start eating again. Right now the very idea nauseates me.
This is going to be like the kitten again, isn’t it? No… This is much worse than when Momiji died. That, at least, wasn’t really my fault. I’m not sure how I’ll ever be able to get through this.
My phone suddenly rings out with electronic music. Since I didn't answer her texts, Mai’s calling me. I put the phone on silent. She’ll forgive me later.
I really should have done something...It was up to me to make things better and I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t smart enough. I didn’t deserve to confess to him in the first place. He didn’t deserve…any of this.
She's not giving up, is she? The phone vibrates over and over and over again on the nightstand. I can’t hear the sound of myself thinking.
Frustrated, I move to turn the phone off completely, but in my violent clumsiness, my thumb grazes the wrong button, and the worst-case scenario becomes reality: I accidentally take the call.
“...Nako?”
...Crap!
Aghast, I stare silently at the phone, my lips parted with paralyzed surprise.
“Iwanako,” Mai’s colorful alto voice sternly calls out from the speaker. I consider not answering, letting her tire herself out. I want more than anything just to hang up on her, but I can’t bring myself to. I can scarcely bring myself to do anything, right now.
“For fuck’s sake, Nako!” she shouts through the phone. “I’m so not on board with this shit. I know you’re there. Fucking answer me.”
I exhale. God damn it.
“…Hi,” I mumble into the receiver.
“Ugh. What the hell is going on? You’re not going to the hospital anymore? It was killing you? What the shit does any of that mean?”
She gets like this when she’s angry, and she has every right to be, I suppose. He was Mai’s friend before I had anything to do with him, after all, and I haven’t exactly been communicative.
Do I really want to do this right now…?
…Nothing for it, I guess. “I…Today…Today was the last time I’ll ever visit him,” I stammer into the phone. “I just…I can’t…”
It’s taking no time at all for this to get to me, and I fail to suppress an audible sob. No, I see that talking to her now was a bad decision. There’s a silence on the other end.
“I, I tried, you know? I really—” I manage to stifle another sob, “I really thought I’d get through to him eventually, we could work through all this, but he’s just gone.”
I’m starting to lose all my bearings now, and I reach for the box of tissue paper on my nightstand, one of several I’ve had to blaze through since this all began. I set the phone down and try to bring myself back to some measure of composure, but it’s so hard to hold everything back and then it all just quakes under the surface…
“Iwanako?”
“Y-you saw it yourself!” I impulsively sputter into the phone. “He’s given up on something. Happiness, I guess. He doesn’t even talk to me and I’m too guilty to say anything and I just can’t do this anymore Mai!”
While I’m blubbering the phone goes silent for a few moments. I wipe my face with another tissue.
“…I’m sorry, Nako,” she says, her voice contrite. ‘About everything.”
“What are you s-sorry about? I’m the o-one who should be sorry.”
“Wha...? None of this is your fault.”
“Of course it is!” I sob.
“How?!”
“Are you kidding me?” I scream shrilly into the phone. “How can you not see how all of this is on me?”
She doesn’t bother to answer.
“…I’m coming over,” she says, finally.
Oh god, no...I don’t want to be around anybody. Just leave me alone, Mai. Leave me to contemplate the mess I’ve made of things.
“N, no,” I murmur. “Don’t come over. Just leave me alone.”
“H’yeah, no. Fuck that,” she mutters, annoyed. “This isn’t right. I’m not letting you stew like this.”
“I won’t let you in.”
“Then I’ll scale the walls. Or, call the fire department or something. I’ll get in.”
“I’ll, I’ll call the police if you do that.”
“In the state of distress you’re in? Doubt it. They’ll probably want to see what’s up with you, too.”
“I’ll do it! Leave me alone!”
“See you in an hour. Hang in there. Don’t do—”
“Mai, no!”
“—anything stupid,” she says, and the line goes dead.
Damn it.
DAMN it!
<Don’t come here,> I text frantically into the phone. <I mean it.>
There’s no response.
Sobbing uncontrollably now, I curl into a fetal position on the bed, hoping she’ll change her mind, or that something will come up, or something. I don’t want her to see me like this. I don’t want to look her in the eyes. Our long-strained friendship is destroyed for good now. I know it, even if she doesn’t realize it yet. She doesn’t know how hopeless it all is. She doesn’t understand how hopeless he is.
There was never anything I could say to comfort him. How could there be? I could barely even comfort myself. How was anybody stupid enough to look to me as a source of strength? I was worse than worthless.
I don’t even know how I’m going to face my classmates when school goes back in session. They’re all going to probe me for information on his condition, and I’m just going to have to explain I abandoned him because I couldn’t get through to him. How could anybody make that sound like a justifiable action? Everybody thinks it’s my duty to take care of him, and maybe it even was, but it’s just… too gargantuan a task now.
Today was the day, I told myself. Today was the day I was going to make myself have a dialogue with him. We were going to figure things out and come up with a strategy for the future.
I am so naïve.
My unwanted and entirely unhelpful tears have made a complete debacle of my makeup, so, lethargically, I drag myself off the bed and slouch into the bathroom. Mine isn’t as nice as my parents’, with its elegant slate walls and skylight windows, but it doesn’t need to be. Peeling off the coquettish outfit that I selected today entirely for someone else’s sake, I step over to the shower nook and blast myself for a while with the hottest water my skin can physically tolerate. Leaning against the wall of the shower nook, I slide slowly into a sitting position, trying to allow the warm, hard jets of water to massage me into a trancelike state. I just want to be numb right now.
I don’t know how much time has passed when I finally step out of the shower, dripping haphazardly everywhere. Dabbing myself with a violet-colored towel from the rack, I’m overwhelmed by just how silent the house is. If Mother comes home tonight, and there’s always a chance that she won’t, it’ll be late in the night, and she’ll go straight to bed, unless she brings some of her friends home and lounges around the minibar for a while.
I’m tempted to make use of the minibar myself, to be honest. I’ve done it a few times before; it’s not the sort of thing my mother disapproves of. In fact, on more than a few occasions, either inadvertently or intentionally, she’s handed me a mixed beverage with some amount of alcohol in it. It isn’t the sort of thing she does maliciously, not really; she’s just very enthusiastic about alcohol in general, I think.
For my part, obviously, I can barely imbibe any quantity without wholly losing control of my senses, so it’s not something I engage in often. Maybe I’ll do it tonight, if only to put myself to sleep. It isn’t nearly late enough in the day for that, though.
Slipping on a bathrobe and walking back into my bed room, my phone vibrates itself off the nightstand and onto the carpeting below. Another text message from Mai.
<yo i’m here let me in>
Another follows in quick succession: <c’mon nako>
…Damn it.
Heaving a heavy sigh, I put on a pair of slippers and walk back down to the ground floor of the house. It’s a longer sojourn from my room to the front door than it sounds, and if I have to do it too many times, I genuinely get winded. I’m in terrible shape right now, and obviously I’m probably a little malnourished.
Taking a deep breath, I open the front door a crack and peek out. Unsurprisingly, Mai is standing in front of the door in a pink hooded sweatshirt. She looks up from the phone she’s fiddling with and meets my gaze.
“Hey, you,” she says, half-smirking. “Gonna let me in, or what?”
“Y, yeah,” I murmur, pulling the door wide enough for her to step through. She briskly crosses the threshold and kicks off her sneakers as I close and lock the door again.
Mai’s home is so noisy—and the triplets are so obnoxious—that we’ve spent a lot of time together here, and she’s comfortable as you can be, in a house like this. Some days, like today, she acts more like a resident than a guest, and she moves briskly past me to ascend the wireframe spiral staircase that is a central feature of the house. Not knowing what to say, I follow behind quietly.
She’s halfway up the staircase when she glances back at me. “So where’s your mom?”
“I don’t know,” I answer quietly. “She was here when I left.”
Mai shakes her head in disapproval, her tangerine-orange hair whipping in all directions. “She’s so damn weird…”
She says that all the time, so I don’t bother commenting. For all she jokes about my mother when we’re alone, when they’re together they seem to get along just fine, and if I’m being truthful, her creepy stepfather is about a thousand times weirder than my mother. It’s one of the reasons I hate going to her house, though it’s something I’m willing to endure when her mother invites me over for dinner.
We step out onto the second floor of the house, and Mai turns to me. “Do you have anything to drink? You know, other than booze and water? And Lipovitan?”
“Um, there’s some Thums Up in the bar fridge, I think.”
She wrinkles her delicately-upturned nose at me. “What the hell is ‘Thums Up’?”
“I’m not sure,” I admit, running a hand through my still-wet hair.
“What do you mean, ‘you’re not sure’?”
“There was this huge case of bottles sent to our house from Mumbai. It was addressed to Hikaru, so we weren’t really sure what to make of it.”
Mai blinks at me. “Where’s Mumbai?”
“India,” I say flatly. “Everything on the bottles is written in Hindi.”
“Isn’t your brother in Yokosuka?”
“That’s where he’s supposed to be, anyway,” I sigh. I don’t feel like talking about Hikaru right now. “He never got back to us about what to do with the package, so Mother just started drinking them. I guess it’s some kind of weird soda.”
Her amber eyes roll to the ceiling and her whole face scrunches up in that all-too familiar way that tells me she’s contemplating something. But then it slackens and she meets my eyes again. “Damn, okay, you’ve piqued my curiosity. You said the bar fridge?”
“Help yourself. I’m going to get dressed.”
“Kay-kay. See you in a few minutes.”
“Right.”
As I climb the stairs back to my room, I can’t help but take note that Mai is acting remarkably unruffled considering the weight of the day’s events. Like the weather, it’s troublingly incongruous. I thought she would be a lot angrier, or at least more serious, like she sometimes gets around Shin. But she’s never become that way with me. Even now, she seems so mellow. It’s so frustrating… I’ve been falling apart all day and she’s just blithely lounging around.
Slipping into a pair of leggings and a long sweater, thoughts of Mai’s demeanor the last few weeks trickle to the forefront of my mind. Those first few days after the heart attack, when the hospital still wasn’t allowing me to visit, I was even more of a wreck than I am now. I didn’t take any time off from school, so it was a wonder I didn’t lose my mind in class. I have Mai to thank for a lot of that.
Though I think Mai and I are still close, and we have a long history, one wouldn’t suppose as much if they only ever saw us in school. We haven't been in the same class since 1998, we’re in completely different clubs, and I’ve never felt especially comfortable around the boys she spends so much time with. Conversely, Mai doesn’t get along at all with any of my other friends… their interactions always quickly devolve into catty sniping, or worse, so when she encounters them I’m usually forced to act as a mediator. But in those last few weeks of the year, particularly those first few days after his collapse, when I was barely holding things together, I needed Mai to shield me from my entire social circle.
I'm not the school idol or anything—and, god, I wouldn't want to be—but, like Mother, I have a respectable number of friends. Unlike Mother, I'm not always particularly happy with that; I certainly regretted that popularity a few years ago when it resulted in my unwittingly being voted Class Representative. But the familiarity I enjoyed with so many students had never felt so malignant as it became after the heart attack.
At school, I found myself the subject of almost overwhelming amount of attention—it was like living in a tunnel of gossip and whispers. At times, it felt like whole crowds of students were waiting in the wings to probe me for gossip, tact be damned—the life of a loner never seemed so appealing. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have Mai there, running interference and keeping my friends and classmates away from me. Her vigilant behavior was all the more meaningful because I know that she was as worried about him as I was, but she was able to compartmentalize and take care of me, first.
Particularly since the hospitalization, I’ve been reminded of how reliant I am on my friendship with her, even before February, when we could barely spend any time together. So now, with everything that’s happened, it hurts to be around her, for her to be lounging around my house like nothing’s the matter. Because, soon, I’m going to have to move forward without her, living with a sense of hollowness that might not ever go away.
Back on the main floor, Mai’s leaning back on the couch in a cross-legged position, the tattered cuffs of her jeans slipping beyond the heels of her feet. When we were little, she was even more fastidious than I was, but for the past few years she’s been downright slovenly. It’s all the more vexing that she somehow manages to remain beautiful in spite of this. She’s teased me so often for my habit of wearing makeup wherever I go—and at times it hurts a little, because in her case she truly doesn’t need it.
As I come down the stairs, she glances back at me, the uncoated end of a cookie stick jutting from her mouth. As I walk over to the couch, she pushes the rest of it in like a log in a wood chipper and pats the cushion beside her, gesturing for me to sit down. Reluctantly, I do so, curling up across from her.
Her vaguely ursine eyes seek out my own. “Mayo Jaga with eel, right?”
“I…huh?”
She smiles. “I ordered pizza while you were upstairs. Your usual and my usual.”
Mai’s ‘usual’ is a cholesterol-laden fever dream of purukogi, chicken, bacon, cloves of garlic, tuna, and avocado, with extra mayonnaise. I tried a piece once and wished shortly thereafter that I was Catholic so that there would be someone to whom I could anonymously confess.
“I’m not hungry,” I reply flatly.
She rolls her eyes and takes a swig of that weird cola. “When’s the last time you ate?”
“This morning.”
With pointy locks of orange swishing bouncily into her eyes, she gives me a look as though trying to decide whether to kill a spider or put it back outside. “I said ate,” she mutters, “not drank.”
She knows me too damn well.
“I’m not hungry,” I reiterate.
“Nah,” she says cavalierly, “you look like a stiff breeze.”
I pause, waiting for her to finish the idiom. After a few seconds, she smiles with one corner of her mouth.
“No, not ‘could knock you over.’ I mean you literally look like a stiff breeze. Like the human manifestation of a whoosh of air. You need to eat something.”
“Look, I don’t want—“
“I will fight you.” Her eyes smolder with a kind of interior candlelight as they pierce my own.
I crumple slightly against her words. It’s not actually a threat when she says that, at least to me—but it’s not exactly a bluff, either, not if you’ve seen all the judo trophies in her bedroom. Mai is almost never as aggressive as one would initially expect her to be, but she can be… intense. When she walks through the crowds at school, it reminds me of this thing Shin mentioned to me about spider webs; everybody thinks they catch fire if you put a flame to them, but the truth is weirder: they flicker and shrivel. That’s why my friends hate her, I guess. They’re some of the best web-spinners I’ve ever seen.
I’m usually not subjected to this treatment, but when she does inflict it on me, it’s either because she’s very disappointed or very worried. I always wind up capitulating, too, because I have all the inner strength of a handful of aphids.
“Fine, fine,” I sigh. “I’ll have a few pieces.”
“Three. Promise me you’ll have at least three pieces. It’s on me, anyway.”
I can’t even eat three pieces when I’m hungry. Mai eats like an elephant, though, and tends to forget that most people have no need to be anywhere near as gluttonous.
“The best I can do is two,” I say admonishingly, tiredly brushing a stray lock of hair out of my eyes.
“Fine, if you eat the crusts—“
“For god’s sake, Mai!”
“Okay, okay. Just fucking eat, alright? It’s a wonder you haven’t passed out.”
“I never pass out,” I mumble, completely exasperated.
“What about that one time you were on the rag and we were running laps in P.E.—”
“That was for like fifteen seconds and stop bringing it up!”
She quietly rolls her eyes, taking another sip of cola. Having apparently come to terms on the issue of my nutrition, our discussion reaches an awkward lull, and, not having much to say myself, I lean against the couch and gaze blankly into the swirls of dark grain in the hardwood floor—more or less what I would have been doing anyway, had Mai not shown up. A couple minutes pass by this way, in near-complete silence; Mai fiddles on her phone a bit but otherwise sits quietly. It’s as I’ve almost forgotten she’s there when her voice finally cuts through again.
“…You’re looking better than you sounded over the phone.”
I sigh joylessly, not meeting her gaze. “What were you expecting? Did you think I’d shaved my head or something?”
“Well…no,” she admits, reaching for another cookie stick. “I didn’t mean in terms of, like, your physical appearance. You seem more…composed, that’s all.”
“You caught me at a bad time,” I insist. “I’d just gotten home, and I needed some space to zone out.”
“You were visiting him?”
“Obviously.”
“I guess…I don’t really understand the problem. What happened? Did he say something?”
“Do we have to talk about this?”
She shrugs, biting off the chocolate-coated end of the cookie stick. “You’ve just been quietly sulking about it anyway. Might as well make it a spectator sport.”
I don’t immediately answer that, because her flippant reasoning just seems so divorced from my experiences. What have my trips to the hospital been, if not extended sessions of sulking in tandem? We certainly weren’t having a whole lot of conversation.
Ultimately, I decide to gloss over it and just get this conversation over with. The sooner I’ve gotten through it, the sooner I can stop dreading it.
“…No, he didn’t say anything,” I say softly, my voice barely above a whisper. “Nothing, really. He never says anything, anymore.”
Mai grimaces and sinks deeper into plush leather of the couch. “…Right, I’d kind of noticed that myself. I guess I was hoping he’d…I don’t know, start to get over it? Like, if we just gave him some space…”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“The first day of break. He was…kind of cranky.”
“Cranky?”
“Kind of…an asshole, really. I dunno. He was reading some book when I came by and he kept his nose in it practically the entire time I was there. It was like…every time I’d try to start a conversation, he’d grunt or glare at me.”
I nod wordlessly, pulling my still slightly damp hair into a simple ponytail.
It’s true, he’s been doing an awful lot of reading lately… From all that I know about him, it’s unusual—he’s never been a celebrated bookworm, but now he almost always has several books nearby. I can’t blame him, I suppose.
A couple days ago, during the last of our increasingly-scarce conversations, I suggested that somebody could bring over a handheld game console or something, to break up the monotony. I could easily acquire one, but for whatever reason he was incredibly unenthused about the idea. All my attempts at helping turned out like that—laughably impotent.
“Shin and Takumi said they dropped by a couple days later,” she continues. “Pretty much the same deal there. They pulled out a couple minutes of really weaksauce conversation and then he just…got pissy, so they left him alone.”
“It’s been like that for everyone,” I offer. “Even his parents have a hard time getting him to open up.”
That catches her attention, and she raises an eyebrow in my direction. “You talk to his parents?”
“I did speak with his parents,” I answer sullenly. “I certainly don’t plan to do it anymore.”
Maybe that’s why I held out this long—why I was the last person other than them to keep visiting him with any regularity, even when all the visitations were so excruciatingly awful. I don’t know who told Mrs. Nakai that I tried to confess—I suppose it was obvious, given we were alone in the woods together when it all happened—but early on…It was like she placed a burden on me that I wasn’t able to carry.
I think she hoped our relationship, nebulously-defined though it was, would nevertheless inspire him to have a positive outlook. Sometimes when I arrived in the hospital, she’d already be visiting him…and as soon as she saw me, she’d leave us alone to talk. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she was just adding to my burden by having such lofty expectations. I doubt my feelings were anything she’d ever even bothered to consider.
A couple times after visiting him, at her insistence, we would go to the café on the ground floor and converse over coffee—her treat. The coffee was nice, but the discussions much less so. I think Mrs. Nakai just wanted to vent her frustrations to somebody other than her husband, and, perceiving me as a person who cared for her son nearly as much as she did, I became the unfortunate vector for it…which was absolutely wonderful, because trying to act as one person’s emotional support wasn’t exhausting enough. His mother needed to get in on that, as well, apparently.
When she realizes I’m never returning, is she going to try calling me? Will she try to bring me back? I certainly hope not; I think I’d lose my mind.
The memories of her few hospital visits apparently not sitting well with her, Mai pensively runs a well-calloused hand through her hair. Unless she's competing, she almost always wears hers in the same style—flowing loose in back with a fringe in front, the sides clipped away from her face in tails that kind of bleed together. By virtue of the fact that it takes effort—any effort—to put her hair that way, it seems so preposterously unlikely that it would have survived this long. I was positive it'd be a boy's haircut by now.
Come to think of it, I showed you how to wear it like that, once upon a time...
“…You know, your class really shouldn’t have done all that stupid shit for him.”
The non sequitur knocks me out of my reminiscing. “What do you mean?”
She shifts on the couch, sitting up and looking at me more intently. “Remember? That first week, with all of Class Two-Five swarming his hospital room? I didn’t really think about it at the time, but that crap was really pretty fucking tasteless.”
Mirroring her, I straighten my posture. As long as we’re dancing around the elephant in the room by discussing this kind of miscellanea, I think I can keep my emotions from embarrassing me again. “I honestly never even gave it that much thought. Why do you say it was tasteless?”
“Because it was the most meaningless shit ever. Half of the guys who came to see him barely even knew him. And seriously, like… Kinomoto? Kouyama? Fuckin’ Takamachi? Did anybody seriously think he would buy that any of those bitches were suddenly giving a fuck about him?”
Lalochezia, I think, momentarily distracted by a rote memory. Word of the Day, January the twentieth. Noun: The emotional relief derived through the use of indecent or vulgar language.
…What? Why on earth would I recall such an absurd thing? Why now?
)
Time to rectify this matter.