Then why had I let him get beat up without trying to help? Why had I stood by and watched him get smashed to a pulp?
Clearly, I wanted to see him suffer. Physically and psychologically.
Not that I had any particular reason. That’s just how I felt at the moment. Nizaki had bullied everyone else without ever having to pay the price, so this just seemed like the right time for him to get what was coming to him—as though it was finally his turn. I guess that’s just the way it is with bullying: what goes around comes around. There was this time in fourth grade when everybody in the class suddenly decided to pretend I didn’t exist. I never knew why, but I suppose there’s really no such thing as a reason when it comes to bullying. What goes around comes around. So I’m sure I just felt that the needle had spun and finally pointed at Nizaki.
But why do you suppose there’s bullying in the first place?
Because there’s not enough love, I guess.
Who doesn’t have enough love?
Me?
Everybody?
The whole world?
And not enough love for who?
For me?
For everyone?
For the world?
Or for Nizaki?
I have no idea.
Even now, I really don’t.
That evening, the day I first noticed Yoji Kaneda, I went home from school, had dinner, took a bath, and watched TV. Then at some point I wrote this sad little line in my diary: “Not enough love! Not near enough.”
Whose love? For who?
Who knew? Even now, I don’t know.
But some important stuff came out of all this: I found Yoji Kaneda, I started thinking about love for the first time in my life, and I had drilled into my brain the image of that pale, slender arm extending out of that blue polo shirt, reaching out for Nizaki as he lay there on the floor, bawling his eyes out in front of everybody.
Still, I didn’t suddenly feel like I was head-over-heels, out-of-my-mind in love with Yoji.
Like I said before, he was a bit of a lightweight. He was like a baby monkey, always doing this weird stuff. To be honest, he wasn’t exactly the type of guy who was likely to be a love object for a sixth-grade girl on the brink of puberty. Not the type at all.
And after the Nizaki incident, it was mostly that dumbass side of Yoji that I saw around school. Once during a soccer game in gym class, he suddenly turned on his own team and kicked a goal into their net, winning the game for the other side. His teammates chased him around, and somehow he wound up on the roof of the gym. The coach was madder than hell when he found out. And once on a field trip to one of those deer parks, he tried to bring a fawn on the bus. When they told him he couldn’t, the poor thing ran after the bus halfway back to school. Then there was the time when a bunch of his buddies were goofing off in class, scribbling stuff on each others’ faces, and the teacher made Yoji stand in the hall during free period with “toilet” on his forehead, “hot dog” on one cheek, and “Nagoya” on the other.
Way dumb.
Around that same time, I started reading grown-up magazines like Olive and Seventeen, started shaving my legs and armpits and plucking my brows. A boy who acted like that wouldn’t have made much of an impression. Still, he was always somewhere in the back of my mind, even as I was only registering his dumbass side.
I guess it was true even then. Whenever I wasn’t in class, I was looking for him—during free period or when we were mopping the halls, on the way to school or on the way home. At the time I think I told myself that he was always good for a laugh, that I just wanted to see the next stupid thing he would do. I guess I paid so much attention to him because that expectation was so often rewarded.
But whatever.
One of the necessary conditions for falling in love is that you simply see the other person often enough. If you see him enough, you begin to notice his good qualities.
Good qualities?
He’s an asshole and a goofball.
He seems to have a need to be noticed. (Which is something I hate.)
He’s loud. (Which is another thing I hate.)
And he’s short.
Oh, did I forget to mention that? I’m on the tall side, and by sixth grade I was already five feet three inches and completely uninterested in any boy who wasn’t at least my height. So you can see that there was no chance I’d fall for a runt like Kaneda. None.
But somehow I did.
It didn’t matter that he was a short, loud, conspicuous asshole clown. Somehow I was suddenly flipped by the hand of “love,” by that pale arm.
But how?
How did that one word, love, and that one outstretched arm so totally get to me?
Was I that desperate?
I don’t think so. I really don’t.
Or was I? After all, I did write those words in my diary: “Not enough love! Not near enough.” But that was about bullying—not about romance.
But love isn’t selective like that; it’s universal, all-encompassing.
That last bit was Kerstin, who had reappeared again from somewhere.
So Yoji was reaching his hand out to you too, as someone who was part of Nizaki’s world. Deep down, you know it instinctively—that if you grabbed hold of that hand and held on to it, you could have gone to a “Love will save the world” kind of place.
That’s nonsense.
It’s not, and we’re not talking about Kaneda when he was a kid.
So I’m not in love with Yoji in a romantic way? I just want someone to save me from my world?
Not “just.” Though that is part of it.
Part of it? What else is there?
Well, there’s “liking.”
“Liking”?
It makes no sense to ask what “liking” is; it’s a meaningless question.
I’m lost.
“Like” is “like”—that’s all. There’s no reason about it. No other
