The Second Button

The gym was cold enough to see your breath, and the big kerosene heaters roared in the corners like aeroplanes that had decided to stay.

Graduation day. Tuesday the third of March. Twenty-two days left, and eleven until White Day, and I still had nothing ready to say. I had written the answer in my head in Japanese, in Uzbek and once, at three in the morning, in Russian. Each version was worse than the last.

Red-and-white curtains hung around the walls. On the stage stood a potted pine, two flags and a lectern. The third-years sat at the front in rows, the boys in gakuran and the girls in sailor uniforms, each with a paper flower pinned to the chest. Behind them sat the parents in black, and behind the parents, us. Kotone was two seats along from me in the 2-B row, very straight, her hands in her lap. In the teachers' row Hanzawa-sensei was asleep, upright, with perfect posture, which I think is a skill they teach at teacher-training college.

The brass band played. We sang the school song. One by one the third-years' names were read out, and one by one they answered "Here!" and walked up the steps for a rolled certificate, and one by one the parents cried.

Then Minase-senpai gave the graduates' address.

He unfolded a long sheet of paper and read from it in his perfect voice: the three years, the teachers, the sea outside every west window, the friends who would scatter. It was very beautiful and very correct. Then, in the middle of a sentence about the future, he stopped reading and looked up.

"This year," he said, "a very small club taught me that one voice can be enough."

Then he looked down and went on.

In the 2-B row, Kotone looked at her knees. I looked at the back of the head in front of me and thought about one voice, and whose, and how long it had taken, and how many people in that cold gym had been there when it cracked on the first word in October and started again.

At half past eleven the third-years came out into the courtyard through a tunnel of younger students clapping, and the brass band played something with too many trumpets. The cherry tree in the middle of the courtyard was still in tight buds. The camellias were in full red flower, dropping whole blossoms onto the gravel with small, decided sounds.

Then the tradition began. Daichi had explained it to me the week before with great confidence: the second button of the gakuran, counting from the top, is the one closest to the heart. On graduation day girls ask for it. A boy gives it to the one he likes.

Minase-senpai's fan club had formed a queue. Four second-year girls, holding the banner from his tournaments, rolled up, like a flag at a funeral.

He refused them all. Very politely, one by one, with a bow each. "I'm sorry. It's promised." They cried anyway. Then he turned and walked straight across the courtyard, through the crowd and the camellia petals, to me.

He took hold of his second button and twisted it. The threads were strong; it took three turns. Then it came away in his fingers, a brass button with the school gull stamped on it, still warm, and he put it in my hand, together with a slip of paper folded in four. On the paper, in his brush calligraphy, the same hand as the kyūdō banner in June:

Graduation day—

I give my second button

to the one who won

"Sardor," he said.

It was the first time he had called me that. Not Aliev-kun. Just my name, pronounced correctly, which almost nobody in Japan manages.

"You're giving it to a boy," I said. Behind him, the fan club made a sound like a kettle.

"I'm giving it to the winner." The dimple appeared, the one that only shows when he loses. "Don't lose it. Or her."

Fumika arrived before I could say anything, carrying the thick blue binder of Club Regulations against her chest. She had borrowed it from the council room for the morning, with a signed form.

"Aliev-kun," she said. "Read this."

She opened it at Article 12. Clause 1 was the same: three members, the autumn review. Clause 2 was not. The old words about special auditing students had been neatly replaced by one plain sentence:

Exchange students are counted as members.

Underneath: Amended by the student assembly, 21 November. In force from 1 April.

"The twenty-first of November," I said slowly. "There was an assembly on the twenty-first. After lunch. I was there."

I remembered it, dimly: the gym warm after lunch, the new council president reading amendments in a voice like a radio left on in another room, and me thinking about rice.

"It was item eleven of fourteen," said Fumika. "Between the bicycle-parking rules and the umbrella stands. Everyone raised their hands. So did you." She closed the binder. "The council calls it the Aliev Clause."

I looked at Minase-senpai.

"I couldn't bend a rule," he said. "I could change one."

Next April there would be another exchange student somewhere in Japan, and she would join a club, and she would count, from the first day, and she would never know why. I bowed. It was the deepest bow of my life, deeper than the one on my first morning in 2-B, and this time I did not hit anything.

Kotone had been standing two steps behind me the whole time. Now she stepped forward.

"Thank you, Minase-senpai," she said. Aloud, in the middle of the courtyard. "For everything."

He looked at her for a moment, the way he must once have looked at a target before he drew. Then he said, quietly, so that only she could hear, and me, two steps away:

"Say it out loud before he leaves, Shirase-san."

Kotone's ears went red to the tips. She did not answer him. She did not look at me. But she did not look at her knees, either; she looked straight at Minase-senpai, and gave him one small, certain nod, the kind you give when you have already decided something and are only now being told it is a good idea.

Then, to both of us, as if it were a small thing: Kyoto University, the Faculty of Letters. He had heard in February. His father still thought he was going to study law. He was telling him tonight.

"Wish me luck," he said. "Something unreasonable."

That afternoon I put his button in my pencil case, between my 2B pencils and Kotone's folded daikichi, and zipped it shut, and checked it twice on the way down Tsubaki-zaka.

In the evening the back room of Moriyama Cycle was full of dolls.

For Hinamatsuri, Yukari-san had set up seven tiers of red cloth under the faded map of Central Asia, and on them sat the emperor and empress, three court ladies, five tiny musicians and a great many tiny lacquered things, all gazing calmly past the pencil line toward Samarkand. There was chirashi-zushi in a wooden tub, pink and yellow and green. There was clam soup. "Clam shells only fit their own other half," Yukari-san explained. "Gross," said Mio. And there was a strawberry cake with thirteen candles, because the third of March was also Mio's birthday.

I had ordered my present from Oydin-opa's shop in Tokyo, and it had come by post: a girl's doppi, dark red velvet stitched with gold thread. I put it on the table in front of her.

Mio looked at it for a long time. Then she put it on. It fitted exactly.

"Rahmat, aka," she said.

The table went silent. Yukari-san put down her chopsticks. Tetsuo-san, who was awake for once, opened his eyes even wider.

"…I didn't say that," said Mio.

"You said thank you," I said. "And big brother. In Uzbek."

She held out for four seconds. Then it came out: a free app on her phone, since December, fifteen minutes a night, practising in the bath. That explained why the bathroom had sounded like a radio from Fergana. "Don't make it weird," she said.

I made it weird. I stood up and answered her in a flood of Uzbek. I pointed at the bread and she said "Non." I pointed at the rice and she said, "That's chirashi, idiot." I pointed at myself, and there was a long, long silence.

"…Aka," she said, to the tablecloth.

I announced that I would tell Buvi, and my mother, and the whole of Chilonzor. Mio threw a sweet rice cracker at my head. Yukari-san gave the evening a hundred points, and Tetsuo-san said "Mm," and then, very quietly, "Good."

That night, in the tiny back yard, under the hose tap, I poured two kilos of whole wheat into a bucket of water for Navruz. Oydin-opa had sent that too. Eighteen days until Navruz. Twenty-two until Narita. The grains sank slowly to the bottom and lay there, patient.

The wheat, at least, knew exactly what it was supposed to do.