Out the cafeteria door, through the hallway, into the main lobby, out the front doors, around the corner. We look at each other like two convicts escaped from Alcatraz, and then we burst out laughing.
I’ve never seen Emi like that. That expression she made when she first saw us is only getting more hilarious the more I think about it. That was perfect. That was the best prank I’ve ever pulled on someone, and all it involved was a few words and then walking away in a timely manner. It was like we had rehearsed it beforehand.
More importantly, Molly is doubled over, clutching her stomach as she laughs. Ten minutes ago, seeing Molly laugh was something I never could have expected. There her braids go, swinging by her face like pendulums again, the left one straining against the two red clips pinning it to her temple as she leans against the brick wall of the school. Eventually, shortly after my own, her laughter slows.
“Oh,” she sighs, “if that isn’t the best thing I’ve done this week.”
“I’ve never seen Emi like that.”
“Did you see her face when she saw us?” she asks. I nod. “That was gold.”
“The whole bit was gold,” I chuckle. I wonder how much of what she said was true. “I am actually planning to take a walk down to the convenience store. Do you really have something you need to get?”
“I’ll come with, if that’s what you’re asking, but no, I’ve got nothing I need.”
“Really? Then you don’t have to-”
“Hisao, Hisao, you need to stay committed to the act, don’t you know? You’re in the theater club now,” she scolds, grinning. “I’m in too good of a mood to waste it in my room, anyway. I might even be able to be sociable for a change. Let’s go drop off our bookbags at the dorms, I’ll meet you outside.”
That’s true, I don’t want to carry my bag all the way to town. The two of us walk to the dorms and split off to the boys’ and girls’ ones without a goodbye. I run in, throw my bookbag on my desk and grab my wallet. My eyes are drawn to the rows of bottles standing on my bedside table, all of varying sizes, splayed out like the buildings of a city skyline.
I walk over to them and start stuffing them into the drawer, not really thinking why. Maybe I want to prevent another incident like yesterday, or maybe I just want them out of sight, out of mind.
In any case I’m back out within a few minutes, and Molly is nowhere to be found, so I wait outside. She comes out soon enough, nods at me, and we get to walking.
I’ve fulfilled my duty to Nurse, if anything. He asked for walks and here: a walk. It’s smack in the middle of the day, and the sun is beaming down at us from so high that our shadows occupy a pool extending little more than a few inches past our feet, which just adds to the suffering. That’s the point of exercise, right? Suffering? Emi would probably disagree, but Emi is Emi.
We make our way past the parking lot and down the hill, and it starts to get hard to ignore how swelteringly hot it’s getting. We walk on the side of the road with the most shade, but it doesn’t do much good. The scenery around the school is pretty nice, I note. Lots of large trees, the impact of civilization kept to a surprising minimum. Off in the distance, the roofs of the houses in town reflect specks of light like tiny diamonds, gleaming at a corner and disappearing as your perspective changes, only to be replaced by another somewhere else.
“So,” I say, “you have history with Emi?”
“Who doesn’t? If you haven’t talked to her, she’s bowled you over in the hallway.”
I laugh. I wonder if Molly knows of the little incident the two of us had, or if she’s speaking from experience.
“She’s really something, isn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Molly says, looking almost forlorn, “she is,” and she trails off.
It’s a long moment before she speaks again.
“Sorry. Thinking back to when she tried to get me on the track.”
I lean in, interested. I’ve heard this story somewhere else, mainly because it happened to me. Who knows, I might also find out why she was looking so guilty earlier.
“She was prescribed to you by the Nurse? That’s what happened to me, anyway.”
“Something like that.”
“Can you really run in those?” I ask, then immediately rush to correct myself. “I mean- Sorry. It’s just that yours go above the knees. So I thought-”
“No, not in these. Wheelchair. I was still in a wheelchair for my first year at Yamaku.”
I exhale, relieved that she’s not upset. “Really? But you don’t have any… I mean you walk very…”
“I don’t have a limp?”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. Just lots of practice,” she replies, tracing her eyes over the horizon. “I don’t want to give Emi the credit and say that she was the one that pushed me to switch to prosthetics, because I hate giving people that kind of power over me. But she made me aware of how much more independent I could be if I had them.”
“I see.”
I’m surprised that Molly would admit something like that.
“You do, do you?” she says, her tone playfully sharp with reprimand. “What are your parents like?”
I shake my head at the sudden change of topic, smiling. She’s done this before, and it didn’t precede anything very nice. I’ll play along, though.
“They’re…” I start, then stop to think, kicking a stone down the street as we walk, “...nice. Both my parents work, so I didn’t see them all that often, even before I came here.”
She seems to be distracted by this for a moment, but she quickly returns to what she was planning to say.
“Have you called them, since you’ve arrived?”
I pause. “I haven’t.”
“Do they know you like staring at girls’ legs? A lot?”
Blink, Hisao. Eyes up.
“I didn’t-”
“Kidding,” Molly says, flatly. She’s overtaken me by a few steps, and she capitalizes by twirling on a metal heel to stand and watch me.
She grins, suppresses it, frowns. Her eyes shoot off to the side, then come back to me. She shakes her head and looks up at the sky and the wide, wave-like clouds rolling through it, as the sun brightens her face. Her eyes are a very dark brown, not black, I finally notice. When the light passes through them, I can see layers of striated lines converging at the center of her iris, or perhaps radiating outwards.
Something shoots through my thoughts, alien and unusually clear, as if sent by some higher power specifically to color the moment:
She’s beautiful.
“Follow me,” she calls, heading for a bench by the side of the walkway, underneath a tree. When we get to it, she sits a little shakily, the tiniest hint of her being tired, and I flop down ungracefully on the other end, not trying to be so subtle.
She swings her legs around, off the corner away from me, and begins unfastening something. Before I can say anything, she suddenly turns back around and hands me a leg.
“Bon appétit,” she says, impersonally, like a waitress handing me a meal.
My face burns with embarrassment, and I accept the prosthetic awkwardly.
“I, uh…”
“Take a look. Come on.” She grins.
Holding the leg up, I compare it to my own. Even accounting for the fact that she’s shorter than me, it looks like it goes up pretty far. How much does she have left, exactly? The idea of examining under her skirt to find out does wonders in upgrading my tomato red to that of a beet.
It’s made of an elegant silver metal, and is surprisingly light despite not feeling hollow. The knee joint is loose, but moves awkwardly, and I can’t get it to bend intuitively in the position I’m holding it. It attaches to a wide black cup made out of plastic, but with what looks like rubber on the inside, where her leg is supposed to fit in. Considering I’ve never held or even observed a prosthetic leg closely, I don’t really know what I’m looking at, but I do notice that there aren’t any buttons or clasps.
That confuses me, a little.
“How does it go on?”
Molly raises an eyebrow at me. It takes me a moment to notice she’s doing it suggestively.
…What did I just ask?
“You don’t have to hike up your skirt and show me!” I cry. “...Just, there aren’t any buttons.”
“Suction, mainly, but there’s a pin lock on the inside.”
“And, uh, why do you wear shoes?”
“Traction, durability, cleanliness. The feet are slippery, would wear out, and are difficult to clean.”
“Ah,” I say, tentatively declaring myself done and the leg thoroughly inspected. I hand it back to her. “Well, thanks.”
“Anytime,” she says, turning around to reattach it. After a moment, I stand up and offer her my hand, which she accepts. Dusting her skirt off, she sets back down the walkway, and I fall in step beside her, a little less tired after our short break.
Did she just say ‘anytime?’ What’s that supposed to-
“Now, in exchange, can you tell me about something?”
I would normally expect a situation like that, in this context, to follow with a question about my disability. Taking a deep breath, I prepare for the interrogation about to follow.
“Sure,” I reply.
“What happened between you and Shizune?”
…
“Uh oh.”
On our way down the rest of the hill, I manage to explain to Molly the bulk of what happened between me and the dynamic duo that resulted in Shizune’s current mood. I talk about coming back from my tiring run with Emi, then having them barge into my room. I talk about them noticing the bottles on my desk, then go over, as impartially as I can, my frustration over their prodding that led to me yelling at them. I never go into detail about what, exactly, I take the pills for, but I think it goes without saying that the reason I have to take them is the same reason that I’m currently at this school, so Molly doesn’t ask.
For the most part, Molly stays quiet and listens while I rant, offering a concerned “hmm” every once in a while. When I’m finished, we’re already in town, and I automatically pilot towards the small grocery store I had already gone to with Lilly.
As soon as we enter, both of us are silent, moving automatically while I grab some snacks, writing utensils, and a ruler. Molly doesn’t take anything, instead just following me, watching me around my shoulder, seemingly unconcerned with how long I take to select my preferred brand of chips. I pay for my stuff and get it bagged while the cashier pretends he’s not trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. He passes over Molly surprisingly quickly, despite the fact that her appearance should draw far more attention than mine, being dark-skinned with an obvious disability; completely unconcealed prosthetic legs.
Once we’re outside, a question comes to my mind:
“So, why did you want to know?”
“Many reasons.”
“Care to reveal some of them?” I press.
Molly tilts her head, intent on avoiding my questions. “Didn’t Oscar Wilde say that a woman without secrets has no charms at all?”
“Oscar Wilde was gay,” I retort.
Molly’s eyes widen as she looks at me.
“That was pretty good. You can be funny, Hisao,” she says. It’s strange how praise from a person that normally doesn’t dish it out can make you feel warmer than usual, even if it is delivered as part of a sarcastic quip. Or not. Again, I can’t really tell, so I’m forced to either scrutinize everything she says or just take it at face value. I’ve decided to choose the former.
She hums, grinning. “He was probably bisexual, actually. Maybe there just weren’t enough secretive women around him.”
I laugh, and Molly doesn’t seem to want to elaborate on her aforementioned secretive reason. At some point while we were walking, we took a turn off the path that leads back to the school, and I don’t recognize our surroundings. I decide not to question it, since Molly probably knows the town better than I do.
Eventually, she relents.
“I can’t let a piece of gossip so obviously exploitable pass me by. I have a reputation to uphold,” Molly begins. Exploitable… how? She moves to remove a hair clip, adjusting its position and reattaching it. “And in any case it was obvious something had happened between you two. You were sulking more than you usually do; Shizune suddenly felt the need to avoid every question I asked her by changing the subject entirely, so of course it was about you.”
I sort through what Molly’s just told me. “What do you mean I was sulking more than I usually do?”
“You’re always sulking. It’s your… rather permanent affectation.”
I frown. “That’s upsetting, that I seem that way.”
“Do you feel that way?” she asks, and it’s oddly intimate.
I think for a moment. “...Sometimes.”
“Then you’ll show it.”
The way she says that makes me feel like she’s speaking from experience, which saddens me, but her tone is ambiguous as to what should be done about it; does she want me to stop feeling that way, or just to stop showing it?
“...And why would Shizune avoid a subject because it was related to me?” I ask.
“Oh, wow,” Molly starts, taken aback. She puts her hand to her chin, and I can practically see her attempting to structure her reply before she shakes her head and decides to dispense with the formalities.
“She has a crush on you.”
Okay, maybe I would’ve liked some formalities.
“What?”
“Maybe I should change it to ‘had.’ She had a crush on-”
“No, no, I got that part, but- I-” I sputter.
I try to watch her, looking for some reaction. When she gives me none, I sigh. “…Are you messing with me?”
“Yes. No. Maybe. Why do you think I would be?”
“Don’t make me answer that. Why would she have a crush on me?”
“Now that’s a question worth asking yourself. I can’t describe someone else’s values. Well, I could, but you wouldn’t like it.”
Molly isn’t a flatterer, that’s for sure. The way that she almost glares at me makes me feel she has something more to say on that matter. It’s not a very fair question, so she’s responded with an unfair answer. It hurts, of course. Every word Molly says usually hurts in some way or another, but if I really try and think about it from a neutral perspective, she’s right. To use her words, I’ve basically been sulking for the past four months. It did do wonders for my self-esteem, being in that hospital.
The hospital wasn’t the cause, though. I like to pretend it was, and it didn’t make anything better, but it wasn’t the cause.
“You know how she likes board games?” Molly asks, suddenly changing the topic.
“Yeah?”
“But only ones that involve an inordinate amount of luck? Like Risk, where you have to roll dice every turn?”
I think for a moment. “True enough.”
She frowns, an overly serious expression on her face.
“Maybe she finds the way you roll dice sexy.”
…
I’m too confused by Molly’s red herring to laugh immediately, so my face kind of hangs in a half-smile for a second, before I look up and realize that Molly has planted her feet, and we’re standing on the doorstep of the Shanghai, the strange architectural mixture of Japanese Shoji and European wooden furniture hanging over us in a set of overlapping eaves. Molly tilts her head to look in through one of the windows and dusts off her skirt before turning around to face me.
“Why are we-”
I see them now, Shizune and Misha sitting at a booth by the window, both having a nice slice of pie and a cup of either tea or coffee in small china cups. Shizune holds her cup with the tips of her fingers and blows across the top to cool it.
“Oh.”
In less than five seconds, I see Shizune look up and spot the two of us. She looks at me with a confused, perhaps a little sad, expression, and then turns away, crossing her arms and frowning grumpily.
I turn back to Molly.
“So,” I begin, annoyed, “you want me to go in and apologize.”
“No, but you can do that. What I want is to force the issue.”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“I wasn’t involved. I don’t know who’s to blame, and frankly, I don’t care. But I hate interactions like this where two people are locked in limbo, unable to do anything. The reason I brought you here is to force the issue, because if you choose to walk away now, Shizune will have seen us, the two of us, intentionally choose not to enter a store because you saw her inside. It won’t be impossible to reconcile afterwards, but she will always wonder why you made it my issue, on top of your own. So it’s your choice whether you want to go in and apologize, but it’s just that: now you have to make a choice.”
This is the second time I’ve walked into a prank, if you could call it that, that Molly has devised. This time quite literally. She said it herself; she wasn’t involved. She shouldn’t be interjecting herself into my life. In a way, she’s doing exactly the same thing Shizune and Misha did.
Why am I not as upset with her as I was with them, then? Intentions? Shizune and Misha ran into my room just to sate their curiosity. Molly's reasons for doing this are beyond me, but she is trying to get me to make up.
I’m tired.
Is that natural? My entire life’s been upended, and I still haven’t wrapped my head around the idea that I probably won’t see forty. I feel bad for my old friends. I feel bad for my parents. I feel bad for… Iwanako. Most debilitatingly of all, I feel bad for myself. Every person I see in this school reminds me of where I am, and why I had to be sent here. I need to shake this attitude, or I’ll never get anywhere. Learning to actually apologize for once, without putting it off forever… could be a good first step.
It’s no use thinking in private next to Molly. If anyone in this school is psychic, it’s her, not me. I feel like she can see my thoughts printed out on my forehead in full digital display. I can see them reflected back at me in her flickering eyes.
“You know why I’m nervous, don’t you?” I ask.
Molly doesn’t answer.
I continue. “You said she has… had a crush on me?”
“I did. Is that why?”
“No.”
“Smooth. Why, then?”
“...What if it goes wrong? What if she hates me, or rejects my apology? It’s all these ‘what if’s’ in my head that I can’t get rid of.”
“Oh, well then you can come back after you’re done and yell at me about how wrong I was.”
I raise an eyebrow. “You’d let me do that?”
“No, of course not,” she says, tilting her head as if it was obvious. “You wouldn’t have to.”
I look back over to Shizune. She’s still facing the other way, avoiding us.
Me. Avoiding me.
Turning back to Molly, I find her looking at Shizune with a wide grin on her face.
“Because, Hisao, I’m never wrong.”
Wooden chairs, paper walls. The Shanghai is busier than it usually is. Half the tables are full of elderly couples, the only exceptions being Shizune and Misha, at the far south-east corner, in a booth next to the window. The bell above the door rings as I enter, but I don’t spot Yuuko anywhere. Molly watches me enter through the window, then turns and leaves, back the way we came.
I take wide steps over to Shizune and Misha while I collect myself.
“Oh, Hicchan,” says Misha, as I approach. She looks as if she’s about to cry. Shizune, across the table from her, looks up and cocks an eyebrow before crossing her arms. The gesture ends up being pointless, however, as within a few seconds she has to uncross them to sign to Misha, who ping-pongs between the two of us frantically.
“Come to plead your way back into the Student Council, Hicchan? Why? Realize your life is boring without- Shicchan, that’s not very nice. Shicchan, I know... But… Shicchan…”
Misha is speaking awkwardly, in a hesitating tone clearly foreign to her. I don’t think she’s used to being an intermediary on top of an interpreter. I steel myself.
“I would like to apologize,” I say.
Shizune, surprisingly, signs nothing. She waits, looking at me, leaning into the foam backrest of the booth. I shake my head and enter a ninety-degree bow, narrowly avoiding slamming my head into the table.
“Yesterday morning I was unnecessarily rude when you came to my room. I had no right to yell at you as I did. I felt uncomfortable talking about the subject. There were many other, better ways I could have addressed the situation. I’m sorry.”
Misha doesn’t say anything for a while, so I remain in my bow while I listen to the small flutters of fabric indicating the two of them are talking in sign. When Misha finally speaks up, I’m unable to see if she’s speaking for herself, or if Shizune is signing to her.
“We accept your apology.”
I raise my head, Shizune is looking out the window, and I can’t see her face.
“We think that you were right in being upset, because Shicchan says she should’ve ‘taken the hint,’” Misha says, regaining her normal, upbeat voice. “But we think you could’ve been a little nicer~!”
I look at the table and the two cups of tea they have placed between them.
“Can I pay for your drinks?”
Shizune turns around, a confident smile on her face. Her signing is playful but accusatory.
“Hicchan, the tea we’re drinking is veeeery expensive~. The leaves are only grown inside active volcanoes, and they have to train monkeys to harvest them~...”