You Don't Get to Answer for Me

Minase looked at me for a moment, then at Kotone. The kettle ticked on the windowsill.

"How interesting," he said.

He waited. Kotone did not speak. Her pencil lay still on the page, and her mouth was closed, and her eyes were on the table. Minase nodded, slowly, as if she had answered him and he had understood the answer better than I had.

"The offer stands until the festival," he said. He bowed to the room, not to me or to her but to the room, the tatami, the sixty-three volumes of Shiosai. Then he went. He is the only person I know who can walk down that corridor without making it creak.

The door clicked shut.

For about three seconds I was pleased with myself. I had protected the club. We would find a third member on our own, the right way, without a senpai who had held a sports drink out across my towel.

Then Kotone stood up.

She stood up so fast the low table rocked. She was shaking, and she was looking straight at me, not at my collar, not at my shoulder, at me. And she spoke. Not a whisper. Her voice was low and rough, like a door that hasn't been opened for years, and it did not stop.

"You don't get to answer for me. Everyone answers for me. Teachers. My mother. The girls in middle school." Her hands were fists at her sides. "You were the only one who waited for my answer. So wait."

She picked up her bag and went. Her footsteps went down the corridor fast, every board creaking, and then the stairs, and then nothing.

It was the longest thing I had ever heard her say. Since the lighthouse I had counted every word she spoke to me, like coins. This time I forgot to count.

Teachers. Her mother. The girls in middle school. It was a list, and I had been so proud, all year, of not being on it. I had just written my own name at the bottom.

The kettle clicked off. I sat there with two cups and listened to it tick as it cooled.

On Wednesday there were no notes. Not even a blank one. A blank note is still a note; it has a shape; you can hold it. This was nothing. She came in, sat by her window, answered roll call with a raised hand, and spoke to no one, not even Fumika. All day Daichi kept turning round in his seat to check the relay, and all day his hand came back to me empty, and every time I shook my head, and every time he looked as if someone had cancelled a game.

After school I went to the batting net, because Daichi was there, and because I didn't know where else to put myself. He was catching for a first-year pitcher, the ball smacking into his mitt every few seconds like a door slamming in a house where people are arguing. I told him everything between pitches.

He stood up and pushed his mask back.

"A catcher calls the pitch, man." He held his hand down between his knees, where the pitcher could see it. One finger. Two fingers. A wiggle. "Fastball, curve, whatever. The pitcher decides whether to throw it. Sometimes he shakes his head, and I call something else." He dropped his hand. "I never throw it for him. You threw it yourself."

"I'm not a pitcher."

"Everybody's a pitcher, Sado. That's baseball." He pulled the mask back down. "That's life, probably."

At cleaning time Fumika wrung out her rag beside me in the corridor outside 2-B with the force of someone wringing a neck.

"Also," she said, without looking at me, "you were jealous."

"I was protecting the club."

"You were protecting yourself from Minase-senpai, which is a different club." She slapped the rag down on the floor. "Being jealous isn't a crime. Article…" She paused, looking for one. "There's no article. It's just stupid."

That night Buvi was making dough on the kitchen table, flour to her elbows, her healed wrist working the dough as if it had something to prove. Behind her, the loaf on the shelf. I propped the phone against the sugar bowl on my side of the world and told her everything, including the parts that made me look bad, which were most of them.

She listened without stopping her hands.

"Is this the quiet one?"

"Yes."

"Hm." She pressed the heel of her hand into the dough. "The quiet ones hear everything." When I had finished she wiped her hands on her apron and looked straight into the camera, which she almost never manages.

"Do'st achitib gapirar, dushman kuldirib," she said. A friend makes you cry with the truth; an enemy makes you laugh.

"Nobody made me laugh today."

"Good. Then you have no enemies. Only friends." She pointed a floury finger at me through six thousand kilometres. "Your friends are telling you the truth, Sardorjon. Say thank you. Then say sorry."

I sent the thank-yous first, because they were easier. Daichi replied with a baseball, a crying face and eleven exclamation marks. Fumika replied: Acknowledged. Now do the second part properly.

On Thursday at 7:40 I was standing by the shoe lockers in my green-toed 29.5s, next to the locker that has Shirase written on it in small neat letters.

The entrance smelt of wet umbrellas and rubber soles. The morning rush poured in around me: first-years yawning, the baseball club in tracksuits, a teacher with a coffee, everyone hopping on one foot to change shoes. I did not move. I had decided not to write it. Some things have to be said with the same mouth that said the wrong thing.

I counted the lockers in her row: twenty-four. I counted the umbrellas in the stand. At 7:42 I started counting my own heartbeats and gave up, because they were going too fast to be useful.

She came in at 7:43 with her umbrella, saw me, and stopped.

"I answered for you," I said. Out loud. In the middle of everyone. "I was jealous and I was scared, and I said it was for the club. It was for me." Somewhere behind me a locker door banged. I kept going. "I'm sorry. I'll wait for your answer. About Minase-senpai. About everything."

A first-year boy stopped with one shoe on and stared at us. I didn't care. I found I didn't care at all.

Kotone looked at my collar, the way she always does. Then, slowly, her eyes came up past my chin, and for the first time since I had known her she looked at my face and stayed there.

One nod.

She changed her shoes and went upstairs. I stood by the lockers until the bell, breathing like someone who has just carried a very heavy pot a very long way and put it down without spilling anything.

On Friday, in second period, Kurata-sensei was explaining the present perfect with a flashcard of a man who had eaten an apple. Daichi's enormous hand came back over his shoulder towards the front row, holding a blue note between two fingers, his eyes shut.

Autumn wind—I found

the voice I had lost, and used

it to shout at you

I laughed. Not a polite laugh: the kind that comes out of your nose before your mouth can stop it, in a silent classroom, in the front row, under the teacher's desk.

"Sardor-kun!" Kurata-sensei turned round, delighted. "Something funny? In English, please!"

"A haiku, Sensei," I said, in Japanese. "It was very rude to me. I deserved all of it."

The class laughed. Not at me, for once; with me, which Daichi says is the good kind.

Somewhere by the window, nobody made a sound. But when I turned round, Kotone was looking out at the sea with her ears red to the tips.

After cleaning I went to Room 3 first, and filled the kettle, and switched it on, and got out two cups.

I heard her on the Old Building stairs; I know her footsteps now, light and quick, the third stair always creaking. They came along the corridor towards the door. They stopped outside it. For a long moment, nothing.

Then they went away again, back along the corridor and down the stairs.

From the window I watched her cross the courtyard under the cherry tree, not towards the gate but towards the North Building, fast, with her bag held against her chest like a shield. Towards the stairs to the second floor. Towards the third-years' corridor.

I switched off the kettle. And I followed her, at a distance, because waiting, I was learning, is not the same as not looking.