Chapter 2

April 28, 2016

Yukikaze Academy

15°C, partly cloudy

The light in Hokkaido in late April is different from the light in Aomori.

I noticed this in my first week and I have kept noticing it, which is unusual for me — I tend to register things once and move on. But there is something about the quality of it here, the way it comes in low and gold even at midday, the way the sky has more room in it than I’m used to, that hasn’t quite settled into background yet. I’m still looking at it. I find this mildly interesting about myself.

It’s been a month. I know the campus now the way I know most things I’ve decided to know — thoroughly, quietly, without having made a visible effort. The fastest routes between buildings. The vending machine near the east stairwell that dispenses too cold. The library alcoves that catch afternoon light. I know which window faces my dorm from the courtyard, which classrooms are warm, which hallways flood between second and third period and should be avoided.

I am, by any practical measure, settled.

I walk to the literature classroom with this thought, unhurried, in the late-April light.

Mrs. Fujimoto announces the pairs at the start of class, reading from her register without ceremony. I’m listening with approximately a third of my attention — the rest is on the poem we’ve been working through, which I have opinions about that I haven’t said aloud because they’re not the opinions being asked for.

Hoshino. Kanzaki.

I write his name in the margin of my notes. For the exercise — we’ll need a shared document, it makes sense to have the name written down. I don’t examine this logic further. He picks up his bag and moves to the empty seat beside mine and we look at each other briefly, the way you do when you’re about to work with someone, and then we look at the poem.

The poem is about a city seen from a train window. Melancholy in the good, precise way — not performing grief, just documenting an absence carefully. We’ve discussed it twice as a class. I’ve formed opinions. I expect this to be forty minutes of producing a response that resembles the expected response, which I’m capable of and not particularly interested in.

He reads for a moment. Then he says, without looking up: “What did you actually think of the third stanza.”

Not a question. Not what do you think — present tense, open, an invitation to form something. What did you actually think. Past tense. Actually. He’s asking about something I’ve already decided, and he already knows I’ve decided it, and the word actually is doing a great deal of work.

I tell him I think it’s the weakest stanza. That the central metaphor collapses. That it reads like two poems stitched at the seam.

He considers this. Not performing consideration — actually sitting with it, which I can tell because he doesn’t speak immediately, and the silence isn’t uncomfortable, it’s just the silence of someone thinking.

“I think the seam is the point,” he says.

I look at the stanza again. I’ve read it four times and critiqued it privately each time. I look at it with what he just said sitting beside it, and something shifts slightly, the way a room shifts when someone opens a window.

I don’t say anything for a moment.

“Hm,” I say.

We write the response. It goes well in the way that working with a competent person goes well — not just dividing tasks, but actually building something together, each part a little better for the conversation that produced it. At some point he reaches across to turn the shared text so it faces me more directly. Not asked. Not announced. Just done, and then his hand is back, and he’s reading again.

I look at the text. I look at the angle he’s turned it to, which is exactly the angle I would have wanted.

I look back at my notes.

Later — near the end of the exercise, when we’re both writing up the last section — the student annotation catches us at the same time. Someone has pencilled, in very serious handwriting, THE RIVER IS A METAPHOR FOR DEATH (IMPORTANT!!!) next to a line about a river that is, as far as either of us has been able to determine, a river.

We both start laughing. Same moment, unplanned, brief — we’re in class, it lasts maybe five seconds, we both pull it back. But it’s real. I register this — his laugh, specifically, the realness of it — and then I move on, and I don’t look at what I’m moving past.

The conversation doesn’t end at the door.

This is the thing I notice. He keeps talking as we leave the classroom, something about the poem, and I keep responding, and the hallway gives way to the stairwell and the stairwell to outside and at some point we are in the mild April air going the same direction, which is not quite either of our directions, and neither of us has said anything about it.

The conversations accumulate across the following weeks in the way that certain things accumulate — not deliberately, just steadily, each one a little longer than the last. We talk about the texts we’re studying. We talk about the campus, which he knows the way of someone who has spent three years on it — the real knowledge, not the official map. Small things. Nothing personal. I am aware that we are both being careful about this and I am aware that this is, itself, a kind of information.

I notice: he says things he means. There is no performance in him, no filling of silence for its own sake. When he doesn’t have anything to say he simply doesn’t say anything, and the silence doesn’t require management. I find this — I look for the right word and the word I find is restful, which surprises me slightly.

I file this. I move on.

The festival preparation starts in earnest the last week of April. By early May the hallways have acquired the low-grade organised chaos of it — sign-up sheets, tables being constructed in the schoolyard, third-years nominally exempt but drifting in and out regardless. I end up in the arts room one afternoon helping with signage because someone asked and I had no particular reason to say no.

He’s there too. Different task, same sprawl — someone asked him to shift furniture and the afternoon has expanded around it. By early evening most of the others have filtered away.

We end up near the window. Not by arrangement — the task simply ended there, near the east-facing windows that look out over the lower rooftops toward the part of the city that’s not quite the campus and not quite Sapporo proper. The light is doing the thing it does here at this hour, the low gold thing, and I’m thinking about this in a background way when he asks me what I left behind in Aomori.

Not why did you transfer. Not do you miss it. What I left behind — which presupposes there was something, which is the more accurate presupposition, which means he’s been paying attention to something I haven’t said.

I answer before I’ve decided to. A version of myself, I say. Mostly.

He nods. Doesn’t ask which version, or what happened to her, or whether I miss her. Just nods, like the answer was enough, like he asked because he wanted to know and now he knows.

I’m still thinking about why I said it — the specific, unguarded way I said it, without the half-second delay I usually have — when the fireworks start.

Not a display we knew about. Just a neighbourhood thing, somewhere below us — we can hear it before we see the light, a low distant percussion, and then the bloom of it above the rooftops. Gold and white. Too far to see properly, just the tops of things, the light arriving a beat after the sound. Neither of us moves toward the door.

We stand at the window. He’s slightly closer than before — not much, just the natural drift of two people looking at the same thing — and I’m aware of this the way I’m aware of the light, as a fact about the room that I’m not looking at directly. The display goes on for maybe ten minutes. Small, neighbourhood-scale, the kind that happens without announcement. I watch the light bloom and fade above other people’s buildings.

At some point he says something. I don’t hold onto the words — something brief about the timing, that neither of us knew this was happening tonight. What I hold onto is the quality of his voice when he said it. Easy. Like we had all the time available and this was just one small part of it.

The fireworks stop. We go back to what we were doing. We leave when the building empties and say goodnight at the place where our routes diverge.

That night I open my journal and write something and stop.

I read it back. I close the journal.

I’m not unsteady — I don’t do unsteady, I have never done unsteady, I am someone who processes and files and moves on. But something is sitting slightly wrong, which is to say slightly not-filed, which is to say I close the journal and lie down and the evening keeps surfacing in small specific pieces that I haven’t asked for.

Not his face. Not the fireworks, or what he asked, or what I said without meaning to.

The text, turned to exactly the right angle. His hand back on the desk before I’d finished noticing it had moved.

I look at the ceiling.

I am very good at knowing when something is starting.