“Chi?” he said.
“Um, yeah?”
More than anything, it was Maou’s evaluation that mattered to her the most. She had learned nearly everything she knew about this job from him. She’d never forgive herself if she made any mistakes with him watching.
But that moment of anxiety disappeared once Maou gave her a smile and a nod.
“That was great,” he said. “Like, I taught all that to you once, and you had it down. No mistakes at all.”
“…Yes!”
A wave of joy that was hard to describe rushed over Chiho. She pumped her fist in the air.
“I thought you’d get stuck on typing in the receipt or handling the fry gap, but you handled all that like a pro. I’m not sure you even need me supervising you any longer.”
“Um…really? I-I don’t like that!”
Chiho blurted it out without thinking.
“Oh?”
“Um…huh? No, um, I mean, I think that’d still be kinda tough, is all. I don’t think I’m that far advanced…”
“Well, no, I’m not gonna leave you all alone or anything. But if you’re this quick of a learner, I bet Kisaki’s gonna have us get into the real nitty-gritty stuff before too long… Oh, fries’re done.”
“Oops!”
An electronic beep indicated the new batch was ready to go, and the golden strands of deliciousness were lifted up from the oil in their metal basket.
“I’ll show you how to salt the fries later on. I’ll do it this time, since we’ve got customers waiting on ’em… Here we go.”
Maou handed her the medium fries destined for Yoshiya’s stomach.
“…!”
Their fingertips met for a moment, causing Chiho to inhale a little in surprise. Maou registered no particular response as he also provided a new tray and some napkins.
“You guys can chat a bit if you want,” he said. “It’s pretty slow right now.”
“Oh, are—are you sure?”
“Sure. Have fun. Just don’t make it too long.”
“Cool! Thank you!” Chiho gave a quick bow and headed for Kaori and Yoshiya’s table.
“Here you go!” she announced. “One fresh medium fries for you!”
“Ooh!”
Chiho placed the tray down, took the plastic number, and reverted from her all-business smile to her normal expression.
“So, um…that’s pretty much how it is around here.”
After all that, this was still a bit embarrassing for her.
“Oh, is it okay to talk?” Kaori glanced back at Maou behind the counter, gauging his response.
“Yeah, he said I could chat a little bit.”
Kaori nodded approvingly. “Wow, that’s pretty kind of him.” Then she gave Chiho a good look, taking the time to study her from head to toe.
“I think that uniform looks good on you,” she observed.
“Huh? Oh, uh, you think?”
“Definitely,” Yoshiya agreed. “Like, totally grown-up.”
“I am not!”
Chiho fanned herself with the number placard, her face starting to go flush.
“Yoshiya, would you stop staring at her legs, please?”
“I’m not doing anything like that, Shoji! Plus, that whole customer service thing you were doing? You looked like you had it down pat.”
“Yeah,” Kaori said. “I think you’re a lot better at it than the girls at my last job, anyway.”
“Really? Well, thanks.”
Being looked at was embarrassing enough. This flurry of compliments was only making it worse.
“Seeing you like this… I dunno, maybe I really should get a job. Kaori keeps telling me this is a good location, too.”
As always, it was hard to tell how serious Yoshiya was being. Kaori scowled at him.
“Here we go again…”
“What? I really mean it.”
“Yeah?” Kaori sneered. “Even if you did, you still wouldn’t be half as good at it as Sasachi. I mean, I know I couldn’t last too long in here.”
“Huh?”
Both Chiho and Yoshiya gave Kaori puzzled looks. She had said the exact opposite to Chiho earlier.
Then there was a shout from the counter. “Sasaki! You got a moment?” She must have idled for too long.
“Sorry, guys. Better get going.”
“Sure thing.”
“Have fun!”
Chiho left the table and jogged up to the counter.
“We have another customer who wanted to say hello, Sasaki.”
“Oh?”
What, to me? Unsure what this was about, Chiho glanced at the customer next to her.
“Ah!”
Chiho held her breath for a moment. The large, well-built foreigner from before was standing there—the one who had made her spill her drink all over her handout and, in an indirect way, caused her to seek this job in the first place.
“Um, hello there!” Chiho began in Japanese. “Thanks for coming!”
Maou was kind enough to provide interpretation. “‘I was surprised to see you got a job here,’ he said. He wanted to know if that handout from before was okay.”
“Yeah. I haven’t filled it out yet, actually. But I think with this job, I’m starting to see what kind of stuff I wanna do after graduating.”
“‘I had a lot of trouble figuring out my future when I was in school, too. I kind of dodged the issue during school, unlike you, and it bit me in the rear later on, but I’m pretty proud of the career I have now.’”
“What kind of work do you do, sir?”
“Um, ‘I’m an art dealer from Helsinki who sells Japanese paintbrushes. There’s nothing else in the world that beats them in quality.’ Wow, I didn’t know that.”
“Helsinki?” Chiho said. “Are you from Finland?”
The man eagerly nodded.
“He said he’s going back to Helsinki tomorrow, but he was kind of worried over whether it worked out okay with you, so he thought he’d try coming back here.”
“Well, thanks to him, I think I’ve found myself a pretty good job. I don’t really know about my future yet, but I hope you’ll come back here next time you’re in Japan. I’ll try to make sure I have some good news for you by then.”
“‘Absolutely,’ he says. ‘Good luck. And I promise you, the things you learn in school really do help you out in the future.’”
“Thanks!” Chiho gave a brisk nod of her own. “Oh, Maou?”
“Yeah?”
“…Could you tell him that I’ll try my best to talk to him directly next time?”
“…”
“You see that? No way you could handle that job with people like that around you. They’d crush you for being so useless. And if you really wanna drop out of school, I ain’t gonna stop you, but I don’t think you’re cut out to work here right now.”
“…”
“Yoshiya?”
“Hey, um, Shoji?”
“Hmm?”
“…Where’s Finland?”
“Yoshiyaaaa… I’ll forgive you for not knowing Helsinki, but come on! Finland’s in northern Europe! It’s in the EU and everything! You didn’t even know that and you think you can work with Sasachi? Geez.”
“And people go all the way from there to buy brushes from us?”
“I guess so, unless that guy messed up the translation. I doubt it, though.”
“What do they use them for?”
“How would I know? If you care that much, ask him.”
“How?”
“Ask that Maou dude, or try your a-maaaazing English skills on him.”
“…”
Six in the evening. Chiho’s friends stuck around long enough to meet up with her at the end of her shift. Luckily for them, it never got crowded enough that the crew felt obliged to boot them from their table.
Thanks to the combined efforts of Maou, Kaori, and Yoshiya, Chiho was now confident enough to work through an entire order herself. The learning proc
ess was still only beginning for her, but she still found the shift remarkably fulfilling.
“Hey, Sasaki?” Yoshiya quietly asked on the way back.
“Hmm? What is it?”
“Who’s that guy on your team who knows English? Is he in college, or did he live in the U.S. or something?”
“I don’t think so. I tried asking him once, but he said he learned English because he thought it’d help him with work. We get a lot of international visitors from the offices near the station, actually.”
“He got that good at it just for a fast-food job?”
Chiho had the same question. It wasn’t a bad talent to have, of course, but it did seem like overkill.
“Say,” she replied, “do you know what language they speak in Finland?”
“Huh? Not English?”
Chiho shook her head. “I guess they have their own language. It’s called Finnish, and it’s very different from English. But after that guy graduated from school, he learned how to speak English and German pretty much just studying by himself. He got it all from schoolbooks.”
“…He’s gotta be pretty smart, then.”
“He didn’t go to college, Yoshiya.”
Yoshiya fell silent. Chiho sneaked a glance at him as she recalled Kisaki’s advice. Deciding on your future was nothing more than deciding what to do tomorrow, then doing it over and over again. Maou and their Finnish-speaking visitor learned English in their own respective “todays” because they figured they’d need it “tomorrow.” And maybe they didn’t know what they’d be doing a year from now, but they knew that neither tomorrow nor 365 tomorrows from now would be the exact same as today. To prepare for that, the more weapons you had, the better.
And even if that globe-trotting art dealer didn’t come back to Japan tomorrow, he might come back next month. Chiho at least owed him an English greeting or two, she reasoned. Whether that would pay dividends for her a year or two years from now was another issue, but…still.
“What I’m saying, Yoshiya, is that you can’t do anything for other people if you can’t even make an effort for yourself.”
That didn’t just apply to Maou. It applied to Kisaki, her other supervisors, and everyone else on the crew. They could all make a daily effort, because they wanted to work for the sake of others.
Yoshiya turned back at Chiho. “…What do you mean?” he asked.
She laughed and smiled a devilish grin.
“Not telling!”
After all the effort she needed to figure it out, she wasn’t about to let Yoshiya in on the secret that easily.
“You know,” she added, “I think I could fill out that survey for real now.”
“Whoa, you haven’t done it yet?” Kaori exclaimed.
“Well, for now, I put down that I want to go to a college with a good kyudo program. That’s not a total lie, and that’s about the best thing I could think of anyway. If they don’t like it at the conference, I’ll think about it then.”
“…What’re you two girls talking about?”
From that point until they all went their separate ways, Yoshiya’s face looked like he was having stomach cramps.
The day of conferences had arrived.
Yoshiya’s session was scheduled first, followed by Chiho’s and Kaori’s. All of them, along with their parents, were seated on chairs lined up in the hallway. And after all that griping on Yoshiya’s part, there was his mother, seated right there next to him. Judging how he talked about his brothers, Chiho was expecting an ultrastrict taskmaster. Instead she was small, slightly plump, and supremely mild-mannered.
Ever since his visit to Chiho’s workplace, Yoshiya had grown oddly quiet. It seemed to irk Kaori a little, since fewer things said meant fewer chances to wheedle him.
“Mrs. Kohmura?” said Mr. Ando, inviting mother and son into the classroom. The woman nodded at Chiho and Kaori as she passed by, but Yoshiya didn’t bother to so much as glance at them.
“Sasachi, Sasachi!”
Kaori gestured at Chiho the moment the door closed, inviting her to come over as she crouched down by the slit below the classroom entrance.
“K-Kao, we can’t…”
“Um, Kaori?”
Chiho and Kaori’s mother simultaneously admonished her for so brazenly trying to listen in. But she shouldn’t have bothered anyway.
“…Well, Mrs. Kohmura, thanks very much for taking the time out to attend this conference today.”
Mr. Ando’s booming voice was clearly audible through the door. All three of them rolled their eyes. Sasahata North was in a fairly old school building, so no matter how tightly the doors were fastened, there was practically no soundproofing provided at all.
“…I’ll be in the bathroom,” Chiho’s mother chuckled as she stood up. “Ooh, maybe I should while I have the chance, too,” Kaori’s mother added. As adults, they both must’ve felt uncomfortable listening in.
Once they disappeared down the hall, Chiho and Kaori looked at each other.
“…Uh, me too,” Chiho said, figuring she should join the throng.
“No,” whispered Kaori, pushing her back down. “We have to wait here. Besides, Yoshiya’s been acting weird lately. I’m startin’ to wonder if he had some kinda revelation in his mind or something.”
“Oh, Kaori, how do you even know we can hear him in—”
“So, Kohmura, I apologize that there’s no easy way to say this, but with your current grades, getting into a university English-literature program’s gonna be pretty tough. Where’d that desire come from, all of a sudden?”
“…”
Mr. Ando had nothing if not an inadvertently perfect sense of comic timing. Chiho was about ready to crack up, as was Kaori. Yoshiya, studying English literature?!
“…Mr. Ando,” Yoshiya replied in a reserved voice before the girls could regain their composure, “I’m pretty sure you know this already, but my brothers are pretty much geniuses. But… I know my grades aren’t any good, but I could just never get myself to wanna follow in their footsteps. I’m sure they both had really clear reasons why they wanted to be judges or doctors or whatever, but someone like me… I don’t really have the will to try going down this well-trodden path to success like everyone else does. I just don’t think it would work.”
“No? I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad approach, but…what, then?”
Yoshiya let out a deep, deliberate sigh.
“…………Finland.”
Chiho and Kaori exchanged amused glances again.
“Huh?”
“Mr. Ando, what do you think it’s like to be a person from Finland who goes to Japan so he can purchase paintbrushes to sell back home?”
“Um, pardon me?”
“Do you think he could make a living from that?”
“I’m…not exactly sure where this is going.”
Chiho couldn’t blame Mr. Ando for his confusion.
“I was just thinking,” Yoshiya continued. “You say that being a doctor or working for the government’s really stable work that makes a lot of money, but it’s not like they just hand you a check the moment you get one of those jobs. You have to really work for the government before you get paid, you know? Like, you get paid for teaching classes to us, right? It’s not just a matter of landing a stable job—you’re a teacher, Mr. Ando, because this job gives you something to dream about or work for, right?”
“Mmm, well, yeah, certainly.”
“Some of my friends have been working part-time lately, and I just figured…like, maybe I shouldn’t be trying to just pursue some job title or other. I should try to figure out what I should do if I wanna be able to pursue whatever job I think’s worth striving for in the future. So…”
Yoshiya paused for a moment, perhaps searching for the right words.
“…This guy I saw, I don’t think he studied in school just so he could go to Japan and be a paintbrush dealer. But let’s say that, for some reason or another, that’s what I wind
up doing in the future. I started thinking about what I’d need to do now for that, and…I know I just failed it in the mock exam, but I think English is a big part of it. But I’m not smart or anything, and I know I’ll get all lazy if I don’t have a real goal to strive for, so I thought I’d aim for some kind of high-level English-literature program. That kind of thing.”
“…”
Before they knew it, Chiho and Kaori were hanging on Yoshiya’s every word, faces focused on the door.
“…And what do you think of that, Mrs. Kohmura?” a still-confused Mr. Ando asked.
“…I think that myself, my husband, and Yoshiya’s brothers have taken exactly the kind of well-trodden path he was talking about. My husband has a job in government administration, and before we got married, I was a teacher myself.”
“Ah!”
That surprised Chiho. She instantly began to wish Yoshiya hadn’t been so secretive about his family. She peeked at Kaori. Judging by the way she was holding her breath and staring daggers at the door, she must not have known, either.
“It wasn’t our intention to force the same path on Yoshiya, but I do think being surrounded by people like ourselves made things…uncomfortable for him. I’m worried that he thought we forced his brothers down the paths they took, too.”
“…Aw, nothing like that, Mom.”
“Basically, if our children had a goal in life, I didn’t think it was our place to tell them what to do or not do. Once that decision is made, that’s going to result in something real, whether it’s good or bad. So I know he can be a handful sometimes, Mr. Ando, but I hope you’ll be willing to give him the guidance he’ll need for that goal… I don’t know how Finland got into his mind, but the next time we go on vacation, I’ll make sure he comes along to interpret for us.”
That last sentence was probably intended for her son. There was nothing chiding in it. It was the voice of a mother who always cared for her children—just like how Riho, Chiho’s mother, cared for hers.
“Yeah,” Yoshiya said. “Well, I’m still failing it right now, so don’t get your hopes up too high.”
“Well, you’re going to work on that, aren’t you?”
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 7 Page 19