by Misumi Kubo
“I’m not going to college anyway. I can’t afford it.”
“No. No, no, no. Hold it. Do you know how hard it will be for you to find a job if you don’t go to college? Besides, even if you’ve already decided you’re not going, lessons are bound to be boring with an attitude like that. Where’s the fun in sitting in class not understanding a thing? It’s a total fucking waste of time.”
“Lessons are meant to be boring, that’s the point of them. Everyone sleeps through half of them.”
“That’s only because the teachers are incompetent.”
“Yeah, well. I’m at a bad school. The whole thing’s a farce, students and teachers alike.”
I thought I saw Taoka’s eyes flash as I spoke.
“Right . . . Well, at this rate, you’ll get married as soon as you’re out of your bad fucking school, have a slew of kids, be worked to the bone by assholes like Nakamura, and live out the rest of your life in the projects. But hey, that ain’t such a bad life, eh?”
He smiled and patted me on the back, and I wanted to kill him. At the same time, I remembered the guy lying facedown on the road in the model-train town.
That was when it hit me.
All my life, I’d never once thought about my future, or how my life would end. But now, it struck me that if I just traveled along the track that stretched out in front of me, the chances of me slipping up and ending up facedown on the road were extremely high. Debt, pachinko, habitual violence, heavy consumption of alcohol and cigarettes, sitting in a musty room with the TV blaring all day every day—these were the ingredients that made up the lives of the adults living in the projects. It seemed weird to me now that I’d never thought about them in conjunction with my own future—never tried them on for size.
“There’s no way I’m going to let that happen.” My voice was so loud it took even me by surprise.
Taoka burst out laughing.
“Right, then. Well, you better get studying!”
The following day, Taoka handed me a big sheaf of papers.
“We’ll start by reviewing the middle-school stuff. Each of these is designed to take you about ten minutes, so you can do one per break.”
On the top sheet, Taoka had written in big letters MASTERPLAN TO INCREASE RYOTA’S TEST SCORES BY 35 POINTS. I turned over the cover to the English section, and the exercises began with revision of the alphabet.
“Write out the uppercase and lowercase letters,” read the first question. I got the feeling I was being taken for a total blockhead, but I worked through the sheets nonetheless during my breaks. I’d put the ones I completed in Taoka’s locker, and he’d return them to my locker, marked, the following day.
For about a month, I reviewed the math and English that made up the curriculum for the final year of middle school. When I got everything right, Taoka would write, “You’re a genius!” and draw me a hanamaru, the big flowery circle that signified full marks. I knew it was ridiculous, not least since these were middle-school questions and I was a high-schooler, but the truth was I’d never been praised by a teacher before and I couldn’t help feeling just a little bit pleased. I didn’t want to admit it, of course, even to myself. I still found it weird that I’d suddenly turned into this much of a try-hard at this late stage.
I’d always thought of myself as naturally pretty dumb and had loathed any kind of schoolwork. I was convinced that my bad grades were all a result of my lack of effort. But once Taoka started tutoring me, I began to think that maybe it wasn’t entirely my own fault that I’d done so badly. However many times I made the same mistakes or asked stupid questions, Taoka never once pulled a face. Instead of giving up on me, he kept explaining the same things until I understood. When I made a mistake, he’d write out explanations in red ballpoint pen—often so long they were practically spilling off the page.
Taoka understood what it was I didn’t get, why I didn’t get it, and why I tripped up on particular questions. It was as if he could see straight inside my head. Until he started tutoring me, the stuff I’d learned in middle school was scattered at random throughout my brain, but Taoka went sifting through all that stuff, throwing away the parts I didn’t need and organizing the rest by sorting it into levels of importance. As I worked through the printouts he made for me, the middle-school stuff gradually started to gather itself into solid lumps inside my head. I could feel myself making definite progress. It felt a little like stacking up a lot of solid, weighty bricks, one on top of another.
There was a girl named Akutsu working in the store who also happened to live in the same complex and go to the same school as I did. At break times, she would watch in silence as I worked through Taoka’s printouts. She’d sit there glancing up from her phone, which had a whole bunch of novelty toys and stuff hanging from it, and pulling a face as if she found the whole thing totally repulsive.
Taoka helped me prepare for my first end-of-term test in high school. This time it wasn’t just English and math he was coaching me with, but also Japanese, and world history, and health and physical education, and just about everything else. For English and math, he produced special end-of-term-test printouts, and for stuff like history and biology he looked over what the test was covering and printed out summaries for me that he told me to memorize. All I had to do was remember the information that was on there, and I’d be okay.
Our homeroom teacher at school was a young woman straight out of college. Everyone called her Notchy. When the time came to hand out the results slips, she looked at me with a face sparkling with excitement and said, “You came fourth in the year!”
Takumi tore my results slip out of my hand, then looked at me and mumbled, “What the hell’s with you?”
During vacation, having no family trips planned or summer school to go to, I did my paper route in the morning, worked as a lifeguard at the pool during the day, and went to the convenience store in the evening. On breaks, I continued to work through the sheets. The whole studying like crazy thing had started as just a way to fill time, but at some point I’d really gotten into it.
At the end of vacation, Taoka handed me a few sheets of paper, saying, “This is a review of what we’ve done up till now. Have a go at it at home. You shouldn’t be spending longer than an hour on it.”
The following day, after passing an eye over my efforts, Taoka pinned me with a particularly serious look, and said, “You really ought to think about going to college, you know.”
“I don’t have the money.”
“Shit, man, I’m telling you. Don’t be so defeatist. There’s lots of ways around it—scholarships, recommendation programs, super-cheap colleges, all that kind of stuff. I can take you through everything you need to know. With these kinds of grades, it’d be a waste for you not to go just because you can’t afford it.”
“But aren’t there lots of people who can’t get jobs even after going to college?”
“Listen to me, okay? As you are right now, you’re totally unprotected. You don’t have rich parents, or special talents, or anything else to fall back on. Don’t you think it makes sense to equip yourself with at least one item to up your game? Okay, sure, a degree isn’t totally bulletproof, but even idiots like Nakamura are still considered useful in the eyes of the world so long as they’ve managed to make it into a decent college. . . . In the absence of pressing evidence to the contrary.”
Taoka was raising his voice slightly.
“But you went to a good college, didn’t you? So why are you here, working in a convenience store?” I shot him my best know-it-all face.
Taoka looked at me, unflinching. “Yeah. In my case, they’ve got pressing evidence.”
Akutsu, who was sitting on the sofa, lifted her head from her phone screen and looked from me to Taoka in turn.
“I’ll tell you about colleges another day, okay?” He looked at his watch. “Hey, you guys are done for the day already. Take care getting home, you hear?”
Both Akutsu and I clocked off at ten. W
ith hardly a streetlight to call its own, the road back to the projects was very dark, so Taoka had made me promise to always go home with Akutsu. I pedaled along, my eyes on Akutsu’s back as she rode her bike up ahead of me. All that talk of colleges had left me feeling a little wired.
Inside the grounds, the noise from all the TVs was loud enough to drown out the chirping of the crickets. The block Akutsu lived in was a ways away from mine, and because it wasn’t at all unusual for men to pop up beside the unlit bike racks and grope young girls, I always took the long way around so I could see Akutsu back to the block she lived in. Since we’d entered the projects, Akutsu had been pushing her bike in silence, but now she turned back to look at me and said, “Why are you grinning like that, Goldie?”
Now that I was in high school, Akutsu was the only one who still called me Goldie.
“I’m not.”
“Don’t bullshit me. You’re all pumped up because Taoka said you should go to college, right?”
“No!”
“You should watch out for him.”
I got a whiff of the sickly smell of the lollipop Akutsu was sucking on.
“Why?”
“Why? Because he’s a faggot, that’s why.”
I’d heard the same thing said about Taoka by a few different members of the shop staff. Taoka didn’t really talk much about his private life, so the people at the store took it upon themselves to dream up exotic scenarios and exchange nasty rumors about him. Several times I’d heard people saying he and the manager were secretly a couple. Despite all the part-timers bombarding him with questions, the only things that had emerged as definite were the fact that Taoka didn’t have a girlfriend or wife and that he lived alone in an apartment building close by.
One time, a college student working at the store developed a crush on Taoka and followed him home on the sly. After seeing where his building was, she ran back to the store in a state of extreme excitement to share her findings with her colleagues.
“It’s those luxury ones by the station! You know, the ones they always have flyers for in the newspapers! My mom was saying they’re not renting them out, they’re for sale only! Which means that all the people living there own their apartments. They’re all, like, huge, like, a hundred square meters! And there’s a reception desk with a concierge! What do you think the story is with him?”
A hundred square meters meant nothing to me, and nor did the word “concierge,” which I couldn’t even pronounce. In fact most of what she said went right over my head, but I understood enough to grasp that Taoka lived in a fancy apartment complex very unlike the projects I called home.
“You shouldn’t go saying that kind of stuff about him. You’ve no evidence, right?”
“I’ve seen you making that kind of face before, back in elementary school and stuff.”
Akutsu shot me a look that seemed to say words weren’t enough to express how much of a loser I was, then stuck her lollipop back in her mouth. Crunching away with her front teeth, she looked up at me mockingly. “You’re just excited cause you think you’ve found yourself a new dad.”
From an apartment somewhere, we heard a man shouting and a kid wailing.
“But you’re never gonna get a new dad. Do you remember, Goldie, after it all went to crap? How you used to slap me around the head on like a daily basis?”
“I’m sorry.”
In fact, I’d wiped all of that stuff out of my mind entirely, and this sudden reminder from Akutsu knocked me for a loop. What a little shit I’d been.
“So I’m just saying, don’t get your hopes up too far, ’kay? I’m not having you taking it out on me when it all goes wrong.”
With that, Akutsu fastened her bike to the utility pole and went sprinting up the narrow staircase, the hood of her parka swinging from side to side.
For a while there’d been talk of my mom remarrying, and when it all fell through I’d been really cut up about it. That was when I’d started hitting Akutsu. It wasn’t long after that her family had vanished from the projects without warning, only to return just before the entrance exams for high school.
Right before she’d moved, Akutsu had gone around telling people: “My dad’s taking over the company! He’s gonna be the CEO!”
I didn’t have it in me to laugh at her. Back in elementary school, both Akutsu and I were still the kind of stupid, naïve children who believed everything their parents told them.
Back home, I found my mom sitting at the kitchen table, looking wiped out and eating rice steeped in green tea. She looked like she’d lost more weight in the two weeks since I’d last seen her.
“Where’s Gran?”
“Asleep already. Oh, I finished off the rice from the cooker.”
My mom pushed her bowl away and lit a cigarette.
“Hey, you know that money I left on the table? I need it back, just for a while. I’ll bring it back soon.”
I said nothing. I just went to my room, took the envelope out of the cookie tin on the top of my bookshelf and handed it to my mom. She checked the money inside then stuck it into her wallet, which was covered in tiny beads. Since I’d started high school, my mom had been living with her boyfriend in his apartment by the river. She rarely came back to the projects. Occasionally, like today, she’d pop in without any notice to check on how I was doing.
“You know, you can come and live in his apartment with me if you want,” my mom had offered back when she’d moved out.
“And what will we do about Gran?”
“Oh, we’ll just have to let her handle with things. It’s not my duty to look after her, you know. We’ll leave her to it, and then hopefully . . .”
My gran was my dad’s mother, so my mom didn’t feel the obligation of any blood ties. For me, though, she wasn’t only a blood relation but also the person who’d taken care of me and brought me up in place of my mom. There was no denying that she was pretty senile these days, but living with her still seemed way better than the prospect of living with my mom and her boyfriend, who I’d never even seen, let alone had a conversation with. My mom had left back in May, just before the national holidays. To be totally honest, it was kind of a relief to have her gone.
On a whim, I asked, “Mom, you know my bank account with my present money and stuff? Where’s the bankbook for it?”
The account contained the very small sum left to me when my dad died, and the money my gran would give me every New Year. Before I’d entered high school and started working part-time jobs, it had been the entirety of my savings. My mom rubbed her eyelids sleepily. The room was silent. The smoke from the cigarette she was holding motionless between her fingers stung my eyes.
“I’ll give it to you when you’re twenty. I haven’t touched it since you were a kid, so it’s exactly as it was.” Saying that, she yawned. “It’s late, so I’m gonna stay over, okay? I’m on the early shift at the factory tomorrow. It’s quicker to get there from here.”
Leaving her bowl and chopsticks on the table, my mom went into the room where I usually slept. Inside the bowl was a bunch of twisted cigarette butts.
Now and again, I found myself checking with my mom about that account. I knew deep down that my savings didn’t exist anymore, but seeing her look all nervous like that somehow made me feel a little better. My stomach let out a long, low rumble. Bearing the hunger as best I could, I set about rinsing the rice so it would be ready for tomorrow morning.
When school started again after summer, I’d heard rumors about what Takumi had been getting up to. At the start of the fall term, girls hanging around in the corridors or in the corners of the classroom would sometimes shoot me these looks as if they wanted to say something to me, but, when our eyes met, they’d quickly look away. I heard them whispering words like cosplay and online and amateur porn, but it never crossed my mind that any of this was in relation to Takumi. He’d suddenly stopped turning up to work at the pool midway through summer vacation, and when school began he was often absent. Taku
mi was weirdly popular with the girls, and a few of them came up to ask me if it were true that Takumi was going to quit school.
Shortly after the midterm tests, I arrived at school early after my paper route to find the PE teacher standing in the corridor in his tracksuit, frantically ripping down pieces of paper stuck to the walls.
“Good morning, sir,” I said.
The PE teacher looked at me and said quietly, “Morning.”
He scrunched the papers in his hand into a tight ball and went off in the direction of the staffroom.
It was still before eight, and I was the first one to get into the classroom. It was stuffy, so I opened the windows to let some fresh air in. My plan was to get the math worksheet Taoka had given me out of the way before the first lesson began. Lifting the lid of my desk to put in my textbooks, I noticed a folded square of paper and, when I opened it, I saw a number of pictures of some guy dressed in some kind of funky costume. He was wearing a purple button-down jacket like a lab coat, pulling various poses, and staring straight-faced right into the camera. It took me a good few seconds to realize that the guy was Takumi. In the biggest photos, you could see the white thighs of a girl in a sailor uniform in the frame, standing right in front of him. In a flash, I understood what all those mentions of cosplay and amateur porn had been about.
“You fucking idiot . . .” I found myself saying out loud. For some reason I was grinning. “You absolute fucking idiot!”
The same photocopied sheet of photos had been put into all the desks in our homeroom, and that day the entire school was in uproar. It seemed like absolutely everyone was walking around clutching a copy and talking about Takumi. Some kids took pictures of the photos with their phones and started sending them to heaven knows who.
At break time, people from other classes and higher grades came to our classroom, wanting to see the photos, and then chaos really broke loose. One girl got hysterical, shouting, “It’s disgusting!” and tearing up the printout into little shreds. Nana was going around with a garbage bag in her hand, collecting the copies in the corridor or in the trash and saying to people, “In here! Put them in here please! The teacher said so!”