Love Letters in 5-7-5

After Kamakura the notes got braver.

On Monday morning there was a blue one on the corner of my desk before I had even sat down, and it was not an answer to anything. I hadn't asked a question. She had simply written.

Your notes, bright orange,

all night in my pencil case—

little summer lamps

I read it under the desk until the bell, and through the whole of English, and Kurata-sensei asked me twice, in English, if I was feeling well. My notes. In her pencil case. All night.

I answered on Tuesday. It took me until two in the morning, and the floor of my room became a small orange snowdrift again, but in the end I had seventeen syllables that said what I meant, which had never happened before.

Your blue notes I keep

pressed like flowers in my book.

Is this strange? Maybe.

She read it, and her ears went red, and she did not look at me for the whole of maths, and I decided that this was good.

It was true, too. The Blue Book now held forty-one of her notes, each on its own left-hand page, with my answers copied on the right. It had grown fat and soft at the corners. And I had become careless with it. It lived in my desk now, so that I could stick each new note in the moment it arrived. I thought of my desk as a safe place. In Tashkent, I told myself, nobody opens another person's desk. I had not yet learned that everywhere, even in Tashkent, somebody always does.

On Wednesday, at 12:40, I won the yakisoba-pan war.

I don't know how. I reached over the heads of three first-years at exactly the right moment, and the store lady put a bun into my hand as if knighting me, and Daichi, beside me, empty-handed, looked at me as though I had hit a home run in the last inning. We walked back up to the third floor slowly, so that I could enjoy it. It took about four minutes.

This is what happened in those four minutes. I have put it together from four different people, and I have never liked any of the pieces.

Shōta Kimura, the class clown of 2-B, who can do the voice of every teacher in the school, was looking for an eraser. He looked in my desk, because it was nearest. He found the Blue Book. He opened it, and saw what was inside, and could not believe his luck.

He stood on his chair. He read Kotone's note aloud in a high, squeaking falsetto, like a toy being stepped on. Then he read mine in an accent, a thick, slow, stupid accent that was meant to be mine. People laughed. Somebody shouted, "Love letters in 5-7-5!" and more people laughed.

Kotone stood up. Her chair scraped on the floor, a long ugly sound, and she walked out of the classroom without her bag, without looking at anyone, and the laughter ran out like water from a sink.

When I came in with my yakisoba-pan, the room was silent.

Kimura was still on his chair, holding the Blue Book open. When he saw me, something went across his face, and then, because he had started and didn't know how to stop, he read the last line again in the accent. "Is this strange? Maybe."

Two people laughed. Nobody else did.

I looked at the window seat. It was empty. Her bag was still hanging on the hook of her desk. The book was open in Kimura's hands, at the page with the little summer lamps. I understood only half of it: that she was gone, that the book was open, and that it was my fault, because the book was mine and I had left it where anyone could find it.

My face was hot and my hands were cold. I put the yakisoba-pan down on my desk. I said, loudly, because I didn't know how to say it any other way:

"They are not love letters. They are haiku. Hers are much better than mine. And I like—"

I stopped. Thirty people were looking at me.

"—them," I said.

The class howled.

Then Daichi stood up. He didn't shout. It was the first time I had heard him not shout. "Oi, Kimura," he said. "Enough."

Fumika put down the class register and stood too, very straight. "Kimura-kun. Reading another person's notes aloud is—" She stopped. I watched her search for the article, the clause, the regulation, and not find one. "—rude," she said. "It's just rude."

The room went quiet in a different way. Kimura looked at the book in his hands as if he had just noticed he was holding it. He climbed down off his chair, closed it and put it on my desk, beside the yakisoba-pan, and went back to his seat.

I didn't eat the bun. I didn't eat anything.

She didn't come back that afternoon. In fifth period Fumika took Kotone's bag to the nurse's office and came back without it, and without looking at me. Kimura didn't look at me for the rest of the day either, which, for Kimura, is a kind of speech.

After cleaning I went to the nurse's office. The nurse, a kind woman with a clipboard, told me that Shirase-san had gone home at two o'clock with a headache, and looked at me over her glasses as if she knew exactly what kind of headache it was.

I went to the Old Building. The door of Room 3 was locked. In the staff room the key was still hanging on hook 14, where it had been all day.

I sat on the Old Building stairs with the Blue Book on my knees and didn't open it. The corridor creaked around me like a ship with nobody on board. At five o'clock the town chime began over the roofs, "Yūyake Koyake", the sunset song, the one that tells children it is time to go home with the crows. I waited until the last note had gone out over the sea. Then I went home.

At the door of the shop I said, "Konnichiwa," out of habit.

Mio was sitting on the step with her phone. She looked up at me, and for once she said nothing at all. That was worse.

From Kotone's notebook — Wednesday, 18 June

My haiku were read today in someone else's voice. It was like being thirteen.

I am going to write it down properly, once, so that it stops walking around inside my chest.

Short version. First year of junior high, the culture festival. My haiku won the school prize, so I had to read it on the stage. First line. My voice went up and cracked like a cheap recorder, pii, and the whole gym heard it.

That's all. That's the whole tragedy. A squeak.

Then a boy in my class squeaked at me for a year. In the corridor. In the lunch queue. Whenever I answered a question. He called me "Pii". Other people started too, not even cruel people; it was just funny, the way things are funny when they aren't happening to you.

I quit the town children's choir that December. Grandma still hasn't forgiven the choir.

Since then, when people look at me, my voice goes back down into my chest and sits there. Paper doesn't look at me. Paper waits.

Today Kimura-kun read "Your notes, bright orange" in a squeaky little voice. Pii. Pii. Then he read S.'s haiku in an accent, which was worse, because it was S.'s, and S. wasn't even there to have it done to him.

Read aloud, my words

came out in someone's rough voice—

a moth in a jar

I am not putting that one on a sticky note. Nobody gets that one.

I was on the stairs. I heard him come back. I heard him say they're not love letters, they're haiku. (Correct.) I heard him say mine are better than his. (Also correct.) (Thank you.) Then:

He said "I like—". Then he said "them". I don't know which word I hated more.

I came home at half past two. Mum asked why. I said headache. Grandma said "Headache," from the counter, in the voice she uses for tourists who say they'll come back later.

Tachibana-san brought my bag to the nurse's office and didn't ask me anything. I didn't know she could do that. I will think about Tachibana-san another day.

The blue pad is on my desk. I keep looking at it.

Tomorrow I will not write. I don't know how to stop. But I will.