Friday-the-Thirteenth Valentine

My notes from Thursday night, as dictated by Mio across the kitchen table without once looking up from her phone:

Giri: obligation. For teachers, bosses, fathers. Bought in a shop. "Like a New Year's card you can eat."

Tomo: friends. Girls give them to girls, and sometimes to boys. "It means you're furniture. Nice furniture."

Honmei: true feelings. Usually handmade. "If you get one, you'll know." A pause. "You won't know. Someone will have to tell you."

Chocolate you buy for yourself: "Sad. But valid."

Yukari-san, drying a pan, added that she had given Tetsuo-san handmade chocolate in 1994, and he had said "Mm," and she had married him anyway. From in front of the television, Tetsuo-san said "Mm" again, possibly in agreement, possibly asleep.

In Uzbekistan the fourteenth of February is celebrated as the birthday of Babur, the poet who became an emperor, and at my school in Tashkent we celebrated it with a poetry reading. I had never received a chocolate in my life. I had, however, recited Babur twice.

At ten to eight on Friday the thirteenth of February, the shoe lockers smelt of wet umbrellas and floor polish, and Daichi was standing in front of his locker with his eyes closed.

"Sado," he said. "Stand back."

He opened it the way people open safes in films, slowly, with his ear close to the door. Inside were his indoor shoes. Only his indoor shoes. He looked at them for a long time.

"That's a strikeout," he said quietly. "Looking."

I opened mine. Three small packets fell out, wrapped in pink and gold, each with a sticker: Happy Valentine's! For international exchange! They were from three girls in 2-B, who waved at me from the stairs.

"Daichi," I said, holding them up. "I am popular."

"Those are tomo, man. That's a walk. You're on base, but nobody's cheering."

"In Tashkent," I said, "a walk is still a walk." I ate one on the stairs. It was excellent.

At lunch Fumika walked down the middle row of 2-B and placed a box on Daichi's desk, next to his one-and-a-half-litre bento, with the precision of a chess move.

"This is giri," she said. "Article One."

The box was the size of a hand. Inside lay a heart-shaped chocolate, obviously home-made, with a slightly wobbly number 2 piped on it in white: his catcher's number.

I checked my notes. According to my notes, this was impossible.

"Iinchō," Daichi said, in a very small voice for him. "It's a heart."

"Hearts are a standard shape, Hoshino-kun."

He cried into his bento. Not a little. Fumika stood beside him with her arms folded and her ears the colour of the chocolate's wrapping, and did not leave.

From Kotone, all day: nothing.

No note on the corner of my desk. No blue square on LINE. She sat beside me by the window and turned her pencil and did not write. At lunch she ate looking at the sea. Her ears were red from first period to sixth, like a lamp somebody had forgotten to switch off. She was quieter than she had been since October, and I spent the afternoon going through everything I had said since Setsubun, looking for the mistake.

At cleaning time our group wiped the corridor, and she wrung out her rag so hard that the water ran into the bucket in a rope. Once our zōkin met in the middle of the floor. She moved hers one centimetre to the left and went on wiping, and I knelt there with wet hands, reading the air with everything I had and getting nothing but static.

After cleaning I went to the club room, and she was already there.

Hanzawa-sensei was at a staff meeting, which meant asleep somewhere else. Fumika was at the gym with a stopwatch, timing Daichi's winter stair runs, which the two of them seemed to think was a date. The kotatsu was on. The kettle that did not exist was ticking as it cooled. It was twenty to four, and there were only the two of us. The window was already going gold, and somewhere below the pines the brass band was practising the same four bars over and over, as if they could not get past them either.

I sat down. She did not look at me. She looked at my collar. Then she pushed a small flat box across the table, wrapped in paper the exact pale blue of her notes.

I opened it.

Inside, on a square of white paper, sat four tiny squares of dark chocolate, cut like little sticky notes. On each one a single letter had been piped in white. K. U. I. S.

On top of them lay a blue note.

Bitter and then sweet—

this is not obligation.

Please read the air. Please.

I read the letters left to right. Then top to bottom. Then diagonally, which with four letters is not really possible. There was exactly one way to put those four letters in order that made a word in a language I knew. I did not let myself put them in that order.

[Item received: handmade chocolate ×1]

[Type: giri 0% / tomo ??% / honmei ??%]

[Analysis: FAILED]

[Reading the air: ERROR]

[Kotone affinity: cannot be displayed]

"Excuse me," I said, standing up so fast that the kotatsu quilt came with me. "Please wait. Five minutes. I need a second opinion."

She looked up at me then. For a second I thought she would be hurt. Instead something at the corner of her mouth moved, very slightly, as if she had expected exactly this. She nodded.

I ran.

Literally. Down the creaking stairs of the Old Building, through the pines, across the courtyard, holding the box level in both hands like a waiter, into the corridor outside the gym, where Daichi was running up and down the stairs and Fumika was standing at the bottom with a stopwatch.

"Iinchō. Daichi." I held out the box. "'Not obligation.' Is that tomo or honmei?"

Daichi stopped on the fourth step. He looked at the box. He looked at me.

"HANDMADE IS HONMEI, YOU—"

Fumika put a hand flat against his chest, and he stopped as if someone had pulled a plug. She stepped forward and looked into the box for a long moment, at the four white letters.

"It is honmei, Aliev-kun," she said. "Even the chocolate knows."

Behind me, footsteps. Minase-senpai was walking through the corridor in his coat and scarf, an exam admission slip still sticking out of his pocket, on his way to the staff room. He glanced once at the box in my hands, once at my face, and did not slow down.

"Congratulations," he said, passing. "Now don't be a coward."

Daichi came down the stairs, put both arms round me, box and all, and wept onto my shoulder. "Sado," he said. "SADO." Fumika removed the box from my hands before he could crush it, checked that all four letters were intact, and returned it to me like a document to a citizen.

"You asked her to wait," she said. "That was rude, Aliev-kun. Don't make it ruder. Go back."

At ten past four I was back in the club room. She was still there, with her hands inside her sleeves and her legs under the quilt, exactly where I had left her, as if she had not moved at all.

I sat down.

On the way back across the courtyard I had prepared twelve sentences, in three languages. I opened my mouth to say the first one.

Nothing came out.

For the first time in my life, nothing came out. Not a textbook sentence. Not a proverb. Not Excuse me. I sat there with my mouth open like a fish on Grandma Tae's counter, and my hands, which needed something to do, took one square out of the box and put it in my mouth. It was the K. It was bitter, and then it was sweet.

Kotone watched me eat her letter. Then she spoke, aloud, gently, as if she were helping me with a word I had forgotten.

"White Day," she said. "You can answer on White Day." A small pause. "Or not."

She stood up, slid the box the last centimetre toward me, and left me the rest of the chocolates. At the door she bowed. Then she went home.

I sat in the warm kotatsu in the cold room until the five o'clock chime began over the town, "Yūyake Koyake", thin and far away. In June it had played while I sat on the Old Building stairs, waiting for a door that did not open. This time the door had opened. I was the one who had not gone through it.

Then I did what I always do. I counted on my fingers. Twenty-nine days until White Day. Forty until Narita.

For the first time in my life, I didn't know what to say. It was, Buvi would tell me later, the most honest thing I ever did.