16 - Trust
The sunlight at the end of July was enough to bake the ground.
Everyone was excited about the almost month-long break that was coming up, even despite the boiling heat that sapped our strength and energy. The feeling of summer break set in as we fanned ourselves with our desk pads at lunch, since we were through the hell of semester finals and were gradually getting less classwork.
It had been about a month since I told Tateha I wouldn’t listen to her requests anymore. She really did spill my secret to the class afterwards. She apologized for accidentally letting it slip, but I recognized the puppet strings tangled around the secret that was now floating around.
Everyone looked at me when I got to class in the morning. They asked if what 'Asami-chan' said was true, besieging me with confused looks. The blood vessels around my heart suddenly ran cold even though I had been prepared for this. Tateha had told them everything—about having a prosthetic eye, how she got it... and about how I bullied her.
If you expressed the trust in Tateha and myself as numbers, mine would be bigger. So everyone's facial expressions practically said, "Asami Tateha started talking about weird things." It was an odd incident in their boring, everyday life, and they were looking on like curious spectators.
After I said it was true, Tateha looked uncomfortable and said, "I didn't mean to bring it up." It sounded like it was loaded with sarcasm, like she was telling me, 'I told you so, didn't I?'
The trust in me dropped like a rock. The skewering looks I got—the kind that said, "so she's that kind of person"—felt like they were excavating a cave inside me.
In the middle of all that, it was Kururu who tossed me a lifeline. "I thought she was unusually nice to Asami-san. No wonder."
Other people agreed with that remark. I guess for some reason they thought I was kind to Tateha, if not soft on her.
"I turned over a new leaf. I'm planning to live... in a way where I don't do anything like that again. Being kind to Tateha is just making up for what I did."
I don't know if my explanation had much credibility. But my classmates' grumbling reactions were along the lines of, "So that's what it was." It was like they'd just watched a movie that was interesting at the start but had an open ending. Just like that, I was done confessing my sins. It also helped that everyone was still groggy when the homeroom chime rang. Everyone went back to their seats and the everyday routine began.
My relief came with the realization that I needed to pay close attention to how I spoke and acted from then on. The past and present me. I was supposed to show I was trying to change through the passage of time, not with statements of intent. The unstopping flow of time would show that I was already a different person. I was learning through experience exactly how a stay of execution worked.
I haven't done that kind of thing with Tateha since. I wondered if my feelings got across, since she told me, "Well, I'll try my best too."
She seemed to be living in a world separate from pain. She wasn't hurting herself either, from what she told me. We were slowly but surely making progress from negative trust to zero.
"Ah, so this is where you go."
During the lunch break, I went up to the rooftop. I found the familiar sight of her hair fluttering in the breeze as she pressed her forehead against the fence. Her hair curled towards her face at the ends. It had gotten a lot longer since we met in the spring, and it fluttered as if were trying to hide her outlines.
"Ruri-chan..." Tateha noticed me and slowly looked back over her shoulder. The wind blew her hair back and exposed her ear. The piercing holes I'd put in and chunk I tore out were already beginning to close up. "So you found out I usually come up here, huh?"
"A girl in class said you were headed up here. See anything?" I pressed my face against the fence because I wanted to see the scenery she did, too.
"Just the roofs of houses."
"Guess so, huh..."
I wondered if she had fun going up to the rooftop just to look at houses. I stared out for a little bit but stopped because I figured it would press a rectangular pattern into my face.
"Oh, Tateha, what ended up happening with that swallowtail butterfly?"
Tateha and I found a citrus swallowtail caterpillar when we were going home about two weeks ago. We instantly recognized it because of its plump, green body. It seemed like the caterpillar caught her attention, so we stopped walking and bent down to take a closer look. I was happy and relieved to find out she was interested in something other than pain.
When I suggested she should try raising it, she plucked the leaf the caterpillar was on and carried it home like that. Watching Tateha’s face as she rotated the leaf so the caterpillar couldn’t crawl off, it felt like I could see a light shining on a distant future.
We were definitely beginning to change. We didn't need pain. We could survive without sadism.
"Ahhh..." Tateha looked at the litter on the roof's unmaintained concrete. Pebbles, dry leaves, and someone's discarded chopsticks were strewn around. The unmoving pupil of her right eye stared at the grey garbage dump of a rooftop. "It died."
The harsh summer light poured down like it would bake us, too.