(Continued from last post)
*******
Akira’s philosophy on that seat is contagious; I also can’t help viewing it as obnoxious now.
Instead of sitting down, I move further toward the centre of the bus and choose to stand instead. I wonder which of my new friends at Yamaku would be worthy of being offered that seat. Rin would definitely need it, seeing as she can’t hold onto the bars to keep herself upright. Though I don’t doubt that she would try to hold onto one of the hand straps with her teeth, or wrap her legs around one of the poles like some sort of disfigured stripper.
You could probably make a case for Emi as well, if people with broken legs deserve it, surely someone with
no legs does too. I can’t even picture Hanako being on a public bus in the first place; it’s far too crowded for her taste. I’m not too sure about Lilly or Shizune. They may be blind and deaf, respectively, but that doesn’t prevent them from standing.
Still, aren’t they more entitled to that spot than most people are? That’s where the ethics start to blur. Yeah, I can definitely see why Akira hates that chair.
The remainder of yesterday went by without any further issues. I finished my afternoon classes, went back to my room, made myself some supper, had a debate with Kenji about whether or not the female breast is secretly a venom sac and went to bed. So, thankfully, the damage report I have to give Akira will only pertain to my argument with Emi. Still, messed up with one friend, fixed things with two. That’s a net profit of one disabled girl.
As I step off of the bus I thank the driver and tell him to have a nice day, most people are way too impolite with bus drivers. It’s typically a thankless job and they have to deal with a lot of despicable people in their day to day lives. Despite the thin, grey hair and dark circles under his eyes making him look miserable, he offers an unexpectedly warm smile in return and tells me to have a good day as well.
The Shanghai is relatively close to the bus stop, so it doesn’t take too long for me to walk over there. Pushing open the door to the entrance, I hear the now familiar bell chime and I wait to be greeted by a server.
Today marks my third visit to this café and for the first time, I’m met by someone other than Yuuko. I guess even she gets some days off, however rare they may be. This new waitress seems to be the exact opposite of Yuuko. She’s wearing an excessive amount of eyeliner, has a piercing in her lower lip, and rather than looking nervous, she just looks like she’d rather be anywhere but here. Part of me sympathizes with her; working at the Shanghai must be incredibly dull due to the lack of consistent clientele. She lazily welcomes me and is about to show me to a table when she is cut short by a familiar voice bellowing from across the room.
“It’s alright, he’s with me!”
I look over to my right and her messy, blonde hair almost acts like a beacon, allowing me to spot her instantly. Good, she is here. Part of me was worried that she was just bluffing about coming today and that she’d blow me off at the last minute. For a moment I think that she hasn’t changed her clothes since I last saw her, which would be gross, but upon closer inspection I can see that this suit doesn’t have any stripes on it, and that her tie is red instead of black today.
Maybe I spent too much time looking at her, because she claps her hands and whistles loudly at me. “Come on. Here, boy. You can do it!”
Between her and Mikam—
The Nurse, I’m starting to get sick of all these adults picking on me. I thought people were supposed to grow out of this kind of thing after they graduate high school. I’m unable to hide the blush creeping onto my face, so I just turn to look away from her as I approach her table, the same table where we spoke on Sunday.
“Good boy! I would give you a treat, but I left all of my bones in garbage bags at the bottom of the ocean,” she says as she casually waves at me.
“Good afternoon, Akira,” I respond, awkwardly shoving my hands in my pants pockets. I never know what to do with my hands, so hiding them in my trousers is preferable to leaving them hanging at my side like an ape.
“Well? Have a seat already, or were you waiting for me to be a gentleman and pull your chair out for you?” she asks, pointing at the seat across from her. I assume that’s a rhetorical question, but I don’t want to risk it.
“Nonono, that’s alright,” I stammer out, as I quickly plop down into the chair. Smooth, Hisao.
“Ha, you get flustered too easily; we’ll have to work on that.” She takes a sip from her coffee. I notice that she drinks her coffee black, which is another peculiar quirk of hers. Most women I know dump so much cream and sugar in their coffee that it essentially becomes liquid candy. “So, why are you so late?”
“Huh? I’m not late. This is when we had agreed to meet up,” I protest, holding my wrist toward her to show her my watch.
“Well yeah, but I got here early. You’re late to being early. In the business world you need to make sure to be at all appointments at least a half-hour in advance if you want to come across as professional,” she states, absentmindedly circling her finger around the rim of her mug.
“Yeah, well, I’m not in the business world,” I retort, resting my elbows on the table.
“Fair.”
“Besides, I would have been here sooner, but with the bus schedule the way it is I couldn’t have gotten here earlier even if I wanted to.”
“Hmph, hate buses,” she sneers, repeating her mantra from the other day when I first met her.
“Yeah, hate buses,” I echo back at her.
She nudges forward a second cup of coffee that I hadn’t seen, obscured as it was behind the stand-up food menu. “This is yours, by the way.”
“Oh… Thank you, but what would you have done with it if I didn’t show up?” I ask, taking a sip of the coffee and relishing the feeling of the warm liquid sliding down my throat.
“Drink it? I could chug an entire gallon of this stuff and still sleep like a baby. Caffeine has never really affected me, I just like the taste. My sister keeps trying to make me switch to tea, but I can’t stand the stuff.”
That’s interesting; I never really pegged Naomi for a tea drinker. “Yeah, I don’t really like it all that much either.”
We continue to chat for a while, about my schoolwork and her job. There’s some legal terminology that goes over my head, but I can still understand enough of what she’s saying to keep up. From the sounds of it, she’s a very valuable asset to have if you’re in need of a lawyer. When Kenji inevitably gets caught on indecent exposure charges I’ll be sure to recommend her to him.
After a while, I glance down at my watch again and see that several hours have passed. Time really flies when I’m with Akira; she has a way of making me feel relaxed. Maybe she spiked my coffee with something to sedate me.
I think she notices me looking at the time and she smacks her hand against her forehead. “Gah, dammit. Sorry, kid, for a second there I forgot why we were here in the first place. How did things go with Hisao’s Angels yesterday?”
“ ‘Hisao’s Angels’?” If we were meant to communicate in code words, she could have warned me first.
“You know, like Charlie’s Angels? TV show? Mystery man who’s in charge of a group of women who are secret agents?”
“Uhh, I don’t…”
“You seriously don’t know Charlie’s Angels?”
“No?”
‘Charlie’ is an American name, why would she just assume that I’m familiar with Western television shows? I mean, I would
like to watch more of them, but everything that gets sent over here gets dubbed over in Japanese, and I
refuse to listen to anything other than the original voices. Everyone knows subtitles are clearly superior.
“God, you suck.” She covers her face with her hands in frustration. “I should lend you some of my DVDs or something; you need to be educated, boy.”
I’m not used to being told that I ‘suck,’ so I have trouble coming up with a response to that last statement. Instead I choose to fill her in on how it went with ‘Hisao’s Angels.’
I tell her all about my day yesterday, starting off with what had happened with Emi, just to get the bad stuff out of the way first. Reliving that part doesn’t feel too great, but my mood picks back up once I let her know that I have arranged a new training regimen with the Nurse’s help. She also seems especially impressed by my daring chess escapades with Shizune.
She lauds my efforts with an enthusiastic thumbs up and a big toothy grin. “Well, you made things right with the shy gal and Madame Hakamichi, so good job. Shame about your former running partner though. What was it that she said, again?”
“She said ‘It’s fine, forget about it.’ ”
Akira inhales sharply and makes a strange hissing noise with her teeth. “Yeesh, in lady language, ‘It’s fine, forget about it’ actually means: ‘Things are not fine, and you should be worried.’ ”
“ ‘Lady language’?” Kenji had told me that women had their own secret language, but I didn’t believe him, I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.
“Yeah, I may not speak it myself, but I’m still fluent in it. Maybe you said something to her that you shouldn’t have? Maybe your body language was off-putting?”
“I’m not really sure; I can never tell if I’m saying the right thing. I’ve learned everything I know about life through books and lessons. Schools never teach courses on how to interact with others or how to conduct yourself in social settings, so I’ve always been rather hopeless in that regard, as you’ve no doubt noticed by now. I got by well enough at my old school because I was eased into it, but with Yamaku I’ve just been running around like a chicken with its head lobbed off.”
I finish up the last of my coffee and rest the empty mug back down before continuing.
“It’s like, science is easy. Math is easy, you know? There are concrete, definitive answers to any problem you may have. If you read up on either of those subjects enough, eventually you will come to understand them more. There’s only right or wrong, no maybe, no uncertainty. People aren’t like that; everyone is different so there’s no way to study them. If there was a magical book that could teach me how to deal with people then I would be fine, but that kind of book doesn’t exist.”
She considers what I said, looking down at the table and drumming her fingers on the surface. After a moment she picks her suitcase up off the floor and props it up on the table. It takes her a second to open it because there’s a combination on the clasp. I always thought that having a suitcase made you a big shot, but now I’m thinking that having a suitcase with a lock on it must make you even more of a big deal. I wonder what kind of stuff she has in there to warrant locking up the contents like that.
I’m not left wondering for too long, because once she opens it up, she pulls out a small black book and a pen. A jet-black fountain pen with gold accents to be specific, ‘Akira’ is engraved on the side.
She holds out the book, shaking it back-and-forth as she speaks, “Luckily for you, I currently have such a book in my possession. It’s yours if you want it.”
“Wait, really? You think this can help me?” I doubt that she would just happen to have a book on such a specific subject on her at all times, especially when she clearly has no issues dealing with people herself.
“I think so, yeah,” she says, tossing the book toward me.
I didn’t expect her to throw it at me like that, so I fumble with it a bit, but manage not to drop it. I can’t hold back my curiosity any longer and I begin flipping through the pages, but…
“It’s empty. There’s nothing in here,” I observe, looking back over at her confusedly.
“Well yeah, that’s because we haven’t written it yet,” she responds, flicking the black and gold pen, causing it to roll across the table over toward me.
I hastily grab it before it rolls off the edge and stare back at her with both objects in my hands, still not quite sure what she’s implying.
“You religious, Hisao?”
I think back to my embarrassing experiment the other day that resulted in Kenji killing a large amount of my brain cells by slamming my bedroom door against my head. “No, definitely not.”
“I was hoping you’d say that, otherwise you might consider this next part blasphemous.” She places one hand in her pocket and uses her other hand to point at the leather book in my hands. “That right there is your new bible, ‘The Book of Akira,’ ” she says this as she looks upwards theatrically, as if she were gazing into the heavens themselves.
The Book of Akira.
“Are you… serious?”
“Dead serious. You wanted rules; I’m going to give you rules. When I tell you to write something down, you do so, no questions asked. Once that book is filled up, you’ll have yourself a comprehensive strategy guide on how to beat the game of life. Y’know, tips from someone who’s already won. The keys to the kingdom, as it were.”
“I don’t—”
“RULE NUMBER ONE!” she proclaims, holding her right index finger upwards, “ ‘Akira is the best.’ Go on; write it down like a good little scribe.”
“Really?”
“I told you,
no questions. If you’re going to be taking my advice you first need to recognize that I know what I’m talking about. You only want to learn from the best, ergo, I’m the best. That, and I like stroking my ego.” She puts on an exaggerated air of self-importance and turns her nose upwards smugly as she tells me this. I’m pretty sure she’s joking, but who knows at this point.
This is kind of ridiculous, but I’ll play along if it means that she’ll keep helping me. My penmanship is rusty, but I still try to spell it out in as nice a cursive as I can manage. When you’re writing in an expensive looking book with an expensive looking pen, it feels wrong to write sloppily.
Once I’ve finished writing down Akira’s first rule, I turn the book over and show it to her. She has a bit of a laugh when she sees it and claps her hands together, clearly pleased with herself. “Oh man, this is kind of fun. I never want to have kids, so it’s nice having a protégé of sorts to pass my knowledge on to. Other than my sis, I mean.”
Never wants kids, huh? I suppose I don’t either, but I haven’t put any real thought into it yet, I’m way too young to be thinking about that kind of thing. “So, how old are you, Akira?”
She visibly winces and slumps down in her chair slightly. “Oof. Kid. You
never ask a lady her age. That’ll be rule number two, write that down.”
I can feel my face turn beet-red, so I turn my attention downwards and begin speedily scribbling down the second rule. “S-Sorry, I didn’t know.”
She straightens back up right away and begins laughing once more. “Relax, dweeb. I’m twenty-five. Even though most chicks shy away from the question, I can assure you that I don’t give a damn about my age; I was just busting your balls. Like I said the other day, you need to be more confident. Girls dig that sorta thing, and it’ll make guys respect you. That can be our third and final rule for now.”
I hadn’t finished writing down the second rule, so I pick up the pace and quickly jot down both of them before closing the book.
We continue chatting for a few more hours, and unfortunately, there are no fireworks this time to warn me of how late it’s gotten. It’s only when I take a glance outside and notice that it’s almost pitch-black out that I begin to panic. Once again I had completely lost track of time. Talking and joking around with Akira is almost hypnotizing, I need to start setting an alarm on my phone when we hang out or something.
I quickly stand up and throw some money on the table to cover all of my drinks, there should be some change left over, but I don’t have time to collect it. I thank Akira for helping me again and explain that I need to run to catch my bus or I’ll miss curfew. As I’m halfway to the exit I hear her speak up again.
“Listen, how about I give you a ride back to school?” she offers, now also standing up from the booth.
“I don’t know…” Admittedly, that would be nice, but isn’t that weird? This is only the second time we’ve hung out and she’s seven years older than me.
I think she can see the reluctance on my face and rolls her eyes at me. “What, did mommy teach you to never get in cars with strangers? Look, the only reasons an adult would have to kidnap a high schooler are either to molest them or murder them and harvest their organs. So, first of all, I already have a boyfriend and don’t need to sexually assault anyone. Secondly, no offence, but I doubt your heart would catch a high price on the black market. Besides, you’re taller than me, so if it came down to it you could probably take me in a fight… maybe. So are we good to go or what?”
“It’s not anything like that, it’s ju—”
“Unless you would rather take the bus.” She shrugs, picking up her suitcase.
Okay, she got me there. “Yeah, I’ll take that ride thanks.”
“Was that so hard?” she asks as she passes by me and goes through the exit. She holds the door open with her foot and beckons for me to pass through as well. “M’Hisao.”
I chuckle lightly at her stupid joke as I make my way through the door and begin walking over to her car. “Do you really need to keep treating me like I’m a girl?”
“Stop acting like one and I’ll stop treating you like one, pointdexter,” she retorts, smacking me softly against the back of my head.
She twirls her keychain around her index finger a few times and presses a button in the centre, causing the doors to unlock. She strolls over to the driver’s side and slides into the vehicle, smacking her hand twice against the roof of the car as she enters.
I almost sit in the back, but that’s way too weird, even I know that. She’s my friend, not my nanny.
Huh… I suppose she is my friend now, isn’t she?
Before entering through the passenger side door I open up ‘The Book of Akira’ one last time and read back what I have written down so far, from the bottom to the top.
Rule #3: Be confident.
Rule #2: Don’t ever ask women how old they are. (IMPORTANT)
Rule #1: Akira is the best ツ
Yeah, that sounds about right.
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