by Otaro Maijo
Still, it did sound a little like he was more worried about Maki than me, so as he was taking off his shoes in the doorway I kicked him—my patented Aiko whip kick, a roundhouse to the upper body that I learned from my brother. My bare foot struck his arm—chiban!—and he bent double, letting out a little yelp. Humpf. Drop dead. No, on second thought that might cause trouble.
“Thug,” he muttered.
“You deserved it.”
“Dear God, please grant me the patience to teach the ways of peace and nonviolence to this foolish, violent girl.”
“Say your prayers, you lousy monk. Didn’t you hear? God is dead.”
“Where’d you learn to kick like that?”
“My brother taught me.”
“Figures. Anyway, are your mom and dad around?”
“No…”
“Then let’s go!”
“Okay, but why not come in for a minute?”
“No, I think we should go out.”
“Okay, but what about Kita and Shiba and the others?”
“Gone.”
So…he didn’t want to come in because he was alone. Didn’t want to be alone with me—when it would have been such a perfect chance. Perfect for me, anyway.
“Uhhh,” I murmured.
“What?”
What? “There’s something I need to get first. Come in for just a second.”
“I’ll just wait here,” he said.
“But it may take a minute, even longer.”
“No problem. Take your time.”
“But we’ve got these great cookies you can eat while you wait.”
“No thanks. Don’t bother.”
Ooooh, what a dummy. “Okay, hold on a minute,” I said, and ran up the stairs to pretend to get something I had pretended to need. I stood at the top of the stairs, conscious of him waiting below at the door. He’s here! In my house! What to do? What to do? This might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I had to get him up the stairs and, if possible, into my room. But how? I’d bought some time with the bit about needing to come up to get something. But how was I going to get him up here? And how was I going to get him to fall into my bed? I went into my room, plans spinning in my head, and closed the door behind me. Then I started picking up all the stuff I had flung everywhere. All those magazines, empty cans, half-empty bottles, shirts and sweatpants I’d stripped off and thrown on the bed—but holy crap! It would take forever to pick it all up. No good. I couldn’t bring Yoji in here. Looks like today was a no-go. Maybe a love hotel?
I should have six thousand yen or so in my wallet—just about enough for a love hotel with the daytime discount. It would probably seem weird for the girl to pay for the room, but I was willing to do anything for Yoji.
Okay. I climbed out of my jeans and changed into some really pretty Triumph panties I’d just bought. And the matching bra. Quick check of the pits and pubs, adjust the eyebrows, comb through my hair, then back into the jeans and a shirt. Perfect. But…why was I so totally nervous? I guess because the idea of doing it with Yoji was suddenly getting real. I could tell I was already a little wet down there.
Wait a minute! Don’t get ahead of yourself. Calm down, Aiko. Nothing was decided yet. Too soon for those love juices.
But try telling that to the juices. Did I need to change panties again?
No point really. And these were the cutest anyway.
I stuffed my wallet, cell phone, a mirror, and a hankie into my purse and slung it over my shoulder. Then I left my room and went back downstairs. No sign of Yoji. I put on my shoes and went outside. There he was—standing on the other side of the street by a telephone pole—not even looking this way.
I locked the door behind me and crossed the street to where he was standing. But in the few seconds it took me to get there, my heart started pounding and fluttering and bending all out of shape and just about jumping out of my chest. Scary stuff.
“Sorry I took so long,” I managed to say.
“No worries. Is there a park somewhere around here?”
“Not exactly, but there’s this little playground just down the street.”
“Why don’t we go there?”
We set off together, shoulder to shoulder. I couldn’t believe I was walking along through my neighborhood with Yoji. It was like a dream. I could barely talk.
“What were you doing?” he asked suddenly.
What was I doing? I was changing my panties. “What was I doing when?” I said.
“Just now,” he said. “You said you needed to get something?”
“I did? Uh, I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff today, and I guess I’m a little dazed.”
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You shouldn’t let yourself get so worked up about everything.”
“Everything?” I was only worked up about one thing.
“You know, Sano and Maki and everything.”
Was he kidding? “I’m not worried about any of that.” I really wasn’t. Yoji was the only thing on my mind.
“Okay, forget it.”
“Well, I suppose I was thinking about Sano being kidnapped.”
“Who wouldn’t be?”
“So,” I said, “what do you think happened?”
“What do I think? I think somebody grabbed him and took him someplace. I’ve been trying to figure it out myself. Who’d have the motive?”
Motive? The only reason you kidnap somebody is for money. And there were lots of people who wanted money. In fact, just about all of us did—including me. Not an hour ago I’d been thinking I would cut off my own toe if the price were good enough.
I started to tell Yoji about my idea. How Sano had probably faked the whole thing himself. Yoji walked along beside me, listening but not saying anything. I was just explaining how he could have managed it when we got to the playground.
“Makes sense, doesn’t it?” Yoji looked a little skeptical.
“Maybe,” he said. “But a few things in your theory don’t quite add up.”
Huh? “Like what?”
“Well, for one thing, they said the toe had started to stink by the time his mother found it. That means it was cut off a while ago. Which also means it was too late to reattach it. If he’d been planning to have it sewn back on like you said, he would have put it on ice and had it delivered as fast as he could.”
Now that he mentioned it, that did make sense. If I were going to part with my toe, even for just a little while, I wouldn’t treat it like shit. I’d want to ice it up and wrap it carefully. Maybe even put it in a really pretty box and deliver it myself, leave it somewhere obvious so they’d be sure to find it right away, then ring the doorbell and run like hell. Would that be too much to ask for your own toe?
“And he would have been worried about how long it would take to collect the ransom. If he wanted to have the toe reattached, he would have been in a big hurry.”
He had me there. Oh well.
“When you think about it, your theory doesn’t make sense. And there’s one other hole in it. It seems Sano’s parents couldn’t get their hands on anything like ten million yen. They look sort of rich, but they don’t have that kind of money. They would have had to sell their house to get it. In that case Sano wouldn’t have had anywhere to come home to after getting the ransom, and he knew that.”
“I see what you mean, but how do you know all that stuff?” I asked.
“Know all what stuff?” Yoji said.
“That the Sanos didn’t have the money and all.”
“It was on their website.”
“Website?”
“You didn’t know? Sano had his own website, and his mom and dad posted stuff about the kidnapping. Everybody was talking about it. Then they started this fundraiser to get the ransom money together. Said they would still need two million yen
more after they’d sold off everything they owned, that they’d have to sell the house in three days’ time if they couldn’t raise the whole ten million. It’s all there, right on their site.”
“No way!” Some people have no self-respect. Then again, their son had been kidnapped. “So did they get the two million?”
“It doesn’t look like it. I think everybody thought it was a joke.” Who wouldn’t? Something like that appearing all of a sudden on the web—looks kind of fishy.
“Then last night they added a link to Voice of Heaven, and everybody started posting on the bulletin board and it went totally viral. It was crazy. Apparently that was the end of his mom and dad’s attempt to raise the money.”
Of course it was. You can’t put anything true on the web. You can’t tell people what you really want—or need. You can’t get your prayers answered by tossing them into some fictional universe.
Pretty pitiful. Sano’s mom and dad…and their prayers.
Pretty pitiful to ask when you know ahead of time no one is going to answer.
“So they’ll have to sell the house,” I said.
“Don’t say that—or at least don’t make it sound so simple. Where would they go?”
“It doesn’t matter how it sounds, they’ll still have to sell the house. If you want to change the situation, you have to change how you deal with it, change the whole game.”
“I suppose you’re right. But that’s why I want to find Sano before it comes to that. That would solve the problem.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. But it also sounded practically impossible. I mean, especially if Sano hadn’t faked the whole thing—I mean if he really had been kidnapped, and a real kidnapper had cut off his toe and really sent it to his house and wanted real ransom money. That was truly scary. Totally creepy. No?
“You’ve got to stop sticking your nose into stuff you don’t understand, Yoji. It might be dangerous.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not alone. There are a bunch of us.”
“Then you should leave it to the bunch. Why don’t we forget about it for now and do something else?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” he said.
Why did everybody care so much what happened to Sano? Were he and Yoji really such good friends?
“I didn’t think you and Sano hung out together,” I said, sitting down on some sort of playground ride that looked like a pink bear stuck on a spring. The bear tipped over, and I went with it.
“That has nothing to do with it,” Yoji said. “If somebody’s hurting right in front of you and you can do something to help, you do it. I don’t get worked up about trying to save refugees in Ethiopia, but when some guy in our class has been kidnapped, then I can’t help worrying—and trying to do something. Who wouldn’t?”
You’re right, Yoji. Not many people would say it out loud, but you’re right: sympathy has limits and borders. Even if somebody is really hurting, writhing in pain, if the pain is happening far away, or if it somehow doesn’t seem real, then almost nobody would take the trouble to lend a hand or walk across the street or even so much as glance sideways. That’s natural enough—just the way things are—but no one is willing to admit it. The urge to help and to stay out of it always seem to be at odds somehow.
I suppose people can only do what they want to do.
Or maybe that’s not right. I wanted a Yoji who was some kind of hero, who was willing to help anybody, not just Nizaki or Urayasu or Sano from our class, but the refugees in Ethiopia or the man in the moon or aliens lost in some wormhole.
But there was nobody like that, and it might be scary if there were. A guy like that would have to spend all his time trying to preserve his hero image. So I guess I’d rather have an honest, forthright Yoji. He’s cuter that way anyway.
Still, even if it was just to preserve his image, it might be nice if he wanted to help Ethiopian refugees or the man in the moon or aliens from another dimension. I think I would like a guy like that. Everybody’s got a self-image to protect.
Still, it’s probably best to leave the refugees and the aliens and the man in the moon to a real hero. The rest of us—Yoji and me and everybody else—we have a lot of other stuff on our plates, like real life. With all that to keep us busy, our sympathy for others and our desire for them to fuck off end up tugging us in opposite directions. I’m always like, “Pooor baby!” and then the next minute like, “Dumb asshole!” But then who isn’t?
But I really do want Yoji to turn out to be a hero. I want his compassion, his “poor baby,” to win out over his “dumb asshole.” And if he went running off to Ethiopia or the moon or another space-time dimension, well, I’d go right along with him.
No, what am I saying? I totally love Yoji just the way he is.
And he was sitting next to me right now, not saying anything, just swaying back and forth on the neck of a springy giraffe. The paint was peeling and the yellow spots looked even spottier. I was pretty sure he must be feeling a little embarrassed right now, thinking he’d been too honest, that he’d said some stuff he didn’t need to say. He probably couldn’t figure out what to say next, not until I spoke up. So he just sat there—bounced there—watching me and looking a little sheepish.
I should really say something, I thought.
On the other hand, why bother?
So there it was: the tug-of-war between care and not care.
Shit! My heart was pretty puny. It looked like my urge to avoid trouble was going to win out, even with a guy I really liked. But that was wrong. Just plain wrong!
So…
“So, Yoji.” Was that what I should say? “Do you think you can find Sano?” How was that?
“No way of telling,” he said. “But there’s been no trace of him since that night. Looks like you were the last one to see him.”
“Somebody’s hiding something.”
“Could be,” he said.
I was the last one to see him. What of it? “So do you think I’m involved too?”
“Me? No, of course not! Why would you want to kidnap Sano?”
“You’re right, why would I?”
“That’s what I said. So why would I suspect you?”
“So why don’t you stop saying that I was the last one to see him?”
“That doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a fact. Nobody’s making any more of it than that.”
“Fine, then drop it. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
“Fine. But there’s something I want to ask you, if you don’t mind.”
“What?”
“Do you think there might be some guy who likes you?”
I played dumb. But I felt like somebody had punched me in the back of the head. “What are you talking about?” I held my breath.
“I was just thinking that a guy who liked you would be pretty mad that you and Sano went to a love hotel together, and that he might be the one who kidnapped Sano. It seems like a possibility. Of course, I could be all wrong.”
“What are you talking about? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Why do you say that? It’s not impossible.”
“It’s totally impossible. Because there isn’t some guy who likes me.”
“How can you be so sure? It might be some guy you don’t even know.”
“A guy I don’t know…?” You asshole! Drop dead. Right now, Yoji, drop dead! Disappear. Dissolve. Become nothing. Every last trace of your mortal existence.
“I guess it was a dumb idea.”
If it was a dumb idea, then apologize.
“Sorry,” he said. Then he looked away, and as I glanced at his profile I knew that my cute Triumph bra and panties were not going to be making their debut anytime soon. And I’d gone to all that trouble to change, and they were really cute. Oh well. I didn’t even want to have sex with Yoji any
more. Not really. Probably not anyway. Whatever. I just wanted him to leave. To disappear. How totally annoying. It was all so pointless. Pointless, pointless, pointless! Really for real, Yoji, just fuck off and DIE!
I wanted to get up and leave, but at the same time I was terrified he would just say “bye” and let me go. So I couldn’t move. I also couldn’t bear to look at him anymore. I wanted to ask him how he could sit there with that blank look on his face knowing that Sano and I had been to a love hotel, how he could ask me all those stupid questions about other guys who might like me. I knew how: he didn’t care about me at all. I felt paralyzed sitting there next to him, felt pathetic as hell.
Shit, I was not going to cry. I was starting to cry. Oh, oh, oh, my eyes were burning. I clenched my teeth and looked down at the ground under the weird, pink rocking-bear. But when I squinted, it felt like the tears were going to start. I couldn’t breathe. One false move and the dam would burst. My heart was beating like crazy. Shit, I could practically hear it! My temples started pounding, and all of a sudden there they were: major tears. I was looking at the ground, so my hair was probably giving me some camouflage, but that wouldn’t work for long. He’d figure out what was going on pretty quick. Maybe I should run home. But somehow the short distance to the house suddenly seemed really far. Especially since I was frozen, unable to stand up or walk two steps. The last thing I wanted was for Yoji to hear me sniffling and sobbing. Yet I could tell if I moved even the tiniest muscle, I’d start bawling out loud. Totally embarrassing.