“Do you… want to talk about it?” he asks. “I mean, I know you’re thinking something—I can practically hear the gears turning in your head.”
He laughs.
I force a chuckle.
Tighten my grip on my blanket.
And…
“…Promise you won’t judge?”
“I promise,” Sakuragi-kun says, his voice still amused.
“Okay… Then…”
I take a deep breath and brace myself.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” he says right away.
I open my mouth and…
“How’s your leg feeling?”
Ugh.
Way to go, Ren.
“It’s… fine,” Sakuragi-kun answers finally in an ‘I see what you did there’ tone. “Still kind of sore, but I'm not paralyzed or anything.”
“Oh… Okay. That’s good.”
Another beat passes.
“…That’s not really what you were gonna ask, right?”
I freeze.
“…Maybe,” I mutter.
“Just ask your damn question!” Sakuragi-kun laughs, and my cheeks warm a little.
“Shut up!” I half-yell back, then snap my mouth shut.
I pause to listen for a second—Sakuragi-kun following my lead—but all I hear is the whurr of the air conditioner.
Okay good, I don’t think anybody heard me.
“…It’s embarrassing!” I stage-whisper finally.
“Ooh—it’s an embarrassing question?”
“You are enjoying this way too much.”
“Maybe a little.”
“‘A little’ is way too much.”
“You know, it’s only going to get more embarrassing the longer you stall,” he laughs.
I open my mouth.
Close it again.
Open it again.
And—
“What do you think of Shizuka-nee?” I rush out.
There’s a pause.
“…Really?” Sakuragi-kun asks, and I can hear the smile in his voice.
“What?” I snap. “That’s an embarrassing question!”
“But is it the embarrassing question?”
“Okay, fine,” I grumble. “It’s not the question.”
“Thought so.”
“But it’s still important!” I insist. “She’s my sister.”
There’s a pause.
“…Right,” Sakuragi-kun says, quieter now. “Sorry.”
I pull my blanket up a little higher.
“So?” I press. “What do you think?”
“She’s… nice? A little intense, maybe.”
“‘Intense’?”
“Yeah. Like her whole ‘prove yourself to me’ thing at the pond.”
OH.
OH OH OH.
THE POND.
There’s gotta be some way to segue us over to my question if I can just—
“—fun to hang out with when we got back, too,” he says, and—
Crap.
He’s still talking.
“A lot of questions, though,” he muses.
I realize when he pauses that I’ve been quiet for a while now and he’s trying to give me an opening.
Uh—
Uh—
Uh—
“You still answered her, though,” I say.
Good job, Ren.
“I was being polite!”
“Mhmm. What a gentleman.”
“Uh, yeah. I am,” he says, completely serious.
I snort.
There’s a beat.
Then—
“Do you think she’s pretty?” I ask.
“What?”
“Just answer the question!”
He shifts on his futon. “I don’t know. I… guess?”
“You ‘guess’? This is my sister we’re talking about!”
“It is! Which is why your question feels a little fuckin’ weird.”
I give an exaggerated gasp.
“Sakuragi Toji, did you just use naughty language?” I ask through my shock and outrage.
“Sorry, had I not done that before?” he laughs.
“No! You’re just lucky that Mama didn’t hear you!”
“Sorry, sorry.” Sakuragi-kun’s laughter dies down a bit, and his voice grows nervous. “You’re not, like, actually offended, right?”
“I’ll get over it,” I say. “…If you admit that you like my sister.”
“What?”
“You said she’s pretty!”
“She is—that doesn’t mean that I…”
“Have a cruuush?”
“Yes!”
I laugh.
“I’m just saying. She’s been popular, like, forever—so you’d hardly be the first, Pottymouth-kun.”
“Okay, one: don’t call me that. And two: quit stalling.”
“What? I’m not stalling.”
“Then why won’t you ask me your question?”
“Iam asking you questions!”
“Just not the question.”
“That’s not—” I start.
He doesn’t say anything.
Just… waits.
I shift under my blanket.
“It’s just… not that easy.”
“No?”
“A lot of people don’t really like it when I ask questions.”
“‘People’?”
“I don’t know—people. Grown-ups. Other kids.”
“…Friends,” I add, more quietly.
“Oh…” Sakuragi-kun says, and his voice is… softer. Less challenging. “…We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
I just lie there for a second, fidgeting with the hem of my pajama shirt.
I don’t have to talk about it!
Except… I kinda do.
“It’s… not that I don’t want to,” I mutter. “It’s also just, um, kinda hard to explain.”
“I’ve got nowhere to be,” he says. “If you keep us up all night, we’re skipping school, though.”
‘We’.
“Deal,” I grin.
“Perfect.”
There’s another pause.
My stomach sinks.
I take a deep breath.
“Okay, then… can I tell you a story?”
“Of course.”
I swallow, gather my thoughts.
“So, it was back when Shizuka-nee and I started elementary school—”
“Same year?”
“Mhmm. We’re, like, just under a year apart.”
“Huh. Cool.”
“Any other questions?”
“Not yet! Go ahead.”
“Cool. So, we started school and were put in the same class—small town, you know—and kids just, like, flocked to Shizuka-nee. And of course she and I were already close, so we kind of became the center of this little group—it was so much fun! We did everything together, had our own little references and in-jokes. We were even on a first-name basis.”
“Wow. You guys must have been close,” Sakuragi-kun says. “So… what happened?”
“Well… at first it felt like we were one big group, right? But then… over time it became a lot clearer that some of the kids didn’t really want to be our friend—they wanted to be her friend.”
“…Oh.”
“It wasn’t everyone or anything!” I add quickly. “Different people felt different ways. But even that was… a lot.”
“I bet.”
“So I just… started pushing back once in a while. Reading instead of running around outside—that kind of thing.”
“And… these other kids got mad?”
“Well, they definitely weren’t fans—said I wasn’t reading the room. And then when Shizuka-nee took my side—because of course she did—they turned on her too. And… that was kind of the end of that.”
“…Wow,” Sakuragi-kun says after a moment.
“…Yeah.”
The room goes quiet again.
The wind rattles the window.
My chest hurts.
“…You know,” Sakuragi-kun says after a moment. “I… kinda know how you feel.”
“You… do?”
“Yeah,” he says, then takes a deep breath. “I actually lost a lot of my friends by moving here.”
“What? Why?”
Sakuragi-kun shrugs. I hear his futon rustle softly in the dark.
“I dunno. We said we’d keep talking and stuff, but then everybody kinda… stopped.”
My chest tightens.
“But… that’s awful.”
“Maybe,” Sakuragi-kun says quietly. “I’ve kinda learned not to get my hopes up.”
I frown.
“Get your hopes up about… people?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
“I’m… not sure I understand.”
Sakuragi-kun takes a second to think.
“It’s like—”
He shifts on his futon.
“Okay, have you ever been eating cookies, and they’re so good, but then you eat too many of them and you get a stomachache? And then it’s like ‘Well, fuck cookies, I guess.’”
“Language!”
“Yeah, yeah,” he laughs. “You get what I’m saying, though, right?”
“About… cookies?”
He lets out a breathy, frustrated chuckle and tries again.
“Not just cookies,” he says. “It’s like… sometimes you can like things… but… if the stuff that comes after it is super bad, then… sometimes it’s just… not worth it? So then you do other things instead, even if they’re not as fun.”
“I mean, I guess, but—”
I frown at the ceiling.
But that’s…
Oh.
“Is… that what happened earlier?” I ask. “At the pond?”
There’s a beat.
“…Is that the question?”
My grip tightens slightly on the blanket.
“…Yeah.”
Sakuragi-kun sighs.
“It’s kind of a long story,” he says. “Is that… okay?”
“I’ve got nowhere to be,” I grin. “If you keep us up all night, we’re skipping school, though.”
Sakuragi-kun laughs.
“Deal.”