Part Two
1.
On Saturday it rained properly.
Not the fine June rain that only leaves you damp, but the other kind, zaa-zaa, sideways, the kind that makes an umbrella a formality. The cram school smelled of wet fabric and of the coffee Taguchi-sensei fetches from the machine during the break and never finishes.
We worked on quadratic functions. Twenty-three people with their backs to the windows, all in uniform, all from different schools, and nobody speaks to anyone, because we aren't here as a class but as individuals who happen to have booked the same hour. There's no seating order by name. There's a seating order by your last practice exam. I sat in the third row from the front, which is good, and which I tell nobody, because you don't talk about that sort of thing.
At six thirty I went downstairs, past the pharmacy, and the rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started.
Nakano was standing under the awning of the konbini across the road.
I don't think he had expected me to be on time, and I hadn't expected him to come at all, and so we both stood there for about three seconds like people who have lost their way.
"Are you hungry?" he asked.
We bought nikuman from the heated cabinet beside the register and ate them standing at the counter by the window, looking out at the parking lot, where a woman was reversing into a space and needed three attempts. They were too hot. Neither of us said so; we just held them by the fingertips and blew into them, and at some point he started laughing, mid-chew, for no reason, and then I laughed too.
That was the whole of it. Twenty-eight minutes. Then his bus came and mine came four minutes later.
I told Yuriko on Monday, and she said: "That's nothing." And then, after a pause: "That's everything."
2.
In July the air here gets thick enough to lean on.
The classrooms have fans on the ceiling, four of them, moving the warm air from one corner to another. You put a towel on your desk so the paper doesn't stick to your forearm. The cicadas start at five thirty in the morning, miin-miin-miin, and they don't stop in the evening, they just become part of the silence at some point.
Before summer vacation came the end-of-term tests, then the reports, then the list.
The list goes up in the hallway outside the staff room. It ranks our whole year against each other on the prefecture-wide practice exam, by number, not by name, but everyone knows everyone's number, because it's the same number as on the class roster, and everyone has known that since April.
I was 41st in the year, out of 208.
Yuriko was 160th.
She stood in front of it, backpack over one shoulder, and read it twice, and then said: "Fine." As if someone had read her a weather forecast.
"It's only a practice exam," I said.
"It's the third one."
I should have said something, and I didn't know what, because everything that came to mind would either have been a lie or condescending. So I said the only thing that was true: "Do you want ice cream?"
We went to the machine in the yard, the one with the broken coin return, and ate the popsicles in the shade of the bike racks, and Yuriko said her mother wants her to go to nursing school, and that she doesn't know whether she wants it herself or just doesn't know what else.
"Do you know?" she asked.
I said yes, and then I realized it wasn't true, and I didn't correct myself, because she needed at least one of us to know.
3.
Summer vacation in Japan is not a vacation.
You have homework, in a booklet of its own, numbered day by day. You have club training. Anyone without a real club, like me, has supplementary lessons, six mornings in August, in the same school, in the same rooms, only without the others, and it's strangely quiet.
But there's Obon.
We went to my grandmother's, two hours south by train, where the mountains come in closer. She cleaned the family altar and lit the candle and spoke to my grandfather, who has been dead for nine years, in an entirely ordinary tone, the way you speak to someone in the next room. She told him Nao-chan is in the second year of high school now and good at Japanese. She didn't mention that I'm average at math. I think that was deliberate.
In the evening, the bon dance in the elementary school yard, a scaffold in the middle, paper lanterns, the same three songs on a loop. Old women dance it from the wrist, children dance it wrong and nobody corrects them. I danced in my mother's yukata, which is too wide across my back, and Obaachan watched from the bench and nodded the entire time.
On the way back, in the dark, she asked whether I had a boyfriend.
I said no.
"But someone you think about."
I said nothing, and she laughed, a short, dry laugh, and patted my arm and walked on, and we never mentioned it again. That's how things get settled in our family.
4.
On October first the uniforms change back.
I took the winter jacket from the very back of the closet, and it smelled of the closet, and I hung it by the window overnight. In the morning it really was cold, for the first time, and the bus fogged up inside, and someone had drawn a face on the glass with a finger.
At school everything looked different, because everyone was in dark clothes again. A little more serious. A little more grown up, although nobody had changed.
There was no note in the shoe lockers. There never was another one. The thing with Nakano continued, but slowly and without events, the way almost everything does here: shared bus rides, two borrowed books, an afternoon in November when we wiped the classroom floor together because we were both in cleaning group three, and crawled side by side across the room on all fours without looking at each other once.
In December Yuriko settled it. Nursing school. She says she decided. I don't entirely believe her, but she says it with a firmness I hadn't known in her, and perhaps that's how a decision comes about: you claim it for long enough that it becomes true.
And me?
I still sit behind the circulation desk, six cards a day, and read. In November Iida-sensei told me that the university in the prefectural capital has a degree in library science. She said it in passing, between two card boxes, without looking at me, in such a way that I could have failed to hear it if I had wanted to fail to hear it.
I didn't fail to hear it.
Outside it was already dark by four thirty, and on the way home the paddies lay harvested and mute, and the whole way I thought about what Obaachan would tell the altar if I make it.31Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡr7mrrTU8jn
and then Add to home screen.