Urayasu went on thrashing Nizaki. Mercilessly. For whatever reason, he seemed to want to beat the last bit of shit out of him. The voices urging him on trailed off. It was getting a little scary. And Nizaki looked pretty awful—wonderfully so.
At this point a very ordinary-looking kid in a blue polo shirt—Yoji Kaneda— appeared on the scene. He wasn’t particularly tall or well built.
“Give it a rest, Ura,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s enough?”
“Not quite, Kane. I beat the shit out of this guy and he still doesn’t get it.”
“So why don’t you leave it at that—you beat the shit out of him and he doesn’t get it.”
“So I’ll keep on till he does get it,” Urayasu said.
“Nah, that doesn’t make much sense. Give it a rest.”
“I know it doesn’t make sense, but what the fuck!”
“Just back off a minute, how ’bout?” Urayasu had been straddling Nizaki, and as he climbed off, Kaneda patted him on the shoulder. “Pounding the crap out of a guy is hard work. Look at your hands—they’re all torn up.”
Urayasu glanced down at his raw, red knuckles.
“Shit! I fucked up my hands.”
“And they’ll know you were fighting if you go to the nurse’s office,” Kaneda added. “Just go wash up,” he said, sending Urayasu off in the direction of the boys’ room. When he was gone, Kaneda turned to Nizaki, who was still sobbing on the floor, and reached out his arm to help him up.
His long, slender, beautiful arm.
I can still remember exactly how it looked: the delicate joints at the elbow and wrist, the graceful taper so completely different from Urayasu’s beefy knob. As if something wonderful—an angel’s wing—had been called in to replace something awful—a pig’s foot maybe. That’s how it looked to me, anyway.
Cowering on the floor, Nizaki covered his face with his hands and kicked at the outstretched hand.
“Leave me alone!” he blubbered. “What do you think this is?”
To which the boy in the blue polo shirt replied quite simply: “It’s love.”
Yoji Kaneda was always game for anything, and he was always, always doing something stupid. He told me himself that he and a friend once pissed out the bus window on a field trip in elementary school (though he swore they didn’t hit anybody, not even any cars), and another time, on field day, he ran the hundred meters holding a badminton racquet, telling everybody he needed a handicap. He even ran a relay the same way. (He came in first in the hundred; in the relay, baton in one hand and racquet in the other, he managed to catch one runner on another team but then got the racquet caught between his legs and went sprawling.) And now, he’d said “It’s love,” and even though he added something stupid like “Love will save the world,” the word was still left hanging there. It was the first time I’d ever heard someone say the word so raw, just like that, and somehow it made me feel embarrassed. The first character of my name—the “ai” in Aiko—means “love.” But I’d hardly ever heard anyone use the word except in my name. And now I realized that nobody had been forcing me to stand there and watch Nizaki get the daylights beat out of him. It must have hurt, and it must have been a shock to be beat up in front of people like that. It would be for anybody. So it would have been natural enough, right at the start, to tell Urayasu to stop or do something to end it. You don’t stand around worrying that kids will think you have a crush on Nizaki; as soon as you realize it’s time to stop it, you speak right up and say something. My name may mean “love child,” but I seem to have a little deficit where the love’s concerned, and I sure as hell am never going to save any world. At least not like this.
All of sudden, I couldn’t stand being there anymore and walked away. Kan and Shima stayed behind—apparently they really were infatuated with Nizaki, in a way.
As I left them and headed down the hall, I ran into Urayasu and some of his buddies coming out of the bathroom. His hands were still wet, the skin red and raw around his knuckles. “Shit! That hurts!” he was muttering. As I walked by, I gave him a “you asshole” kind of look, but when I thought about it I realized I was just as much of an asshole. Maybe more. Urayasu had been mad about something, and that’s why he pulverized Nizaki. But what was my excuse for standing there watching them?
I didn’t give a damn about Nizaki one way or the other. He only bullied boys, so I was safe, and though he was cute enough in a way, he wasn’t my type. His bullying was carefully planned and totally vicious, but he wasn’t as violent about it as some of the other kids. There were meaner bullies who did
